Pitch and intonation

Kuiper and Allan Chapter 6.2

 Pitch

• People only rarely speak on a

monotone.
• Pitch changes take two forms in
languages:
– phonemic in tone languages
– intonational in all languages
 Creating pitch

• Pitch is created by the rate of vibration

of the vocal cords.
• You can make your vocal cords vibrate
at different rates when you sing.
• You have a natural pitch span or pitch
range when speaking.
 Exercise

Say the following first as a statement

and second as a question.
Listen carefully for the pitch of your
voice at the end of the utterance.

You left the train.

 Intonation

• is created by pitch movements.

• Intonation is suprasegmental in that it
is an overlay over the segmental
phoneme sequence.
 Tones

• When the pitch of the voice changes during

the production of a syllable we are hearing a
tone.
• Types of tones:
– falling $
– rising €
– rise fall fl
– fall rise ‡
 Exercise

Listen to the following sentence and

see if it divides into intonational
sections.
How many tones does each section
have?
After eating her breakfast, Joanna went
out.
 Tone groups

• Speech is divided into tone groups.

• Each tone group has one tonic syllable
in which there is a tone.
 An analogy

• Think of speaking as rather like singing

where each syllable has a note.
• A tone group is a musical phrase.
• The nuclear tone involves a pitch
change on the syllable; all other
syllables are sung without a change in
pitch.
The musical notation of
intonation

• The normal pitch range

• A tone group

Are you at home

 Where are tone group
boundaries?

• In continuous speech tone group boundaries

tend to come at grammatical phrase
boundaries.
• The tonic syllable (the one having the pitch
change) is usually the last stressed syllable
in the tone group.
• Tone group boundaries are marked by a
vertical slash in a text.
The functions of intonation

• attitudinal
I’ll see you behind the bike sheds afterwards.
You?
• accentual
– contrastive stress
I want a big icecream.
• grammatical
Those who work slowly get to the top.