Intonation a few introductory remarks

1. Introduction
Intonation is a particularly difficult aspect of English to learn, and perhaps even more so, to teach.
Most teachers try to correct some of the more obvious errors which they identify in their pupils -
the most widespread among French students being (at least this is my impression) the tendency to
rise at the end of all sentences.
Many students, fortunately, pick up sufficient practical knowledge of the intonation patterns of
English without much help. But this is not always the case. Some students say that they dont have
a good ear for this kind of thing. Yet the students who say they have no ear are usually perfectly
competent speakers of French, which, though it is fundamentally different from English in terms of
accent, rhythm and intonation, some would say even diametrically opposed (Adamczewski & Keen
on rhythm: Une fois de plus, le franais et l'anglais sont aux antipodes. p179), requires
approximately the same skills.
There are in fact at least two slightly different problems. Students need to be made aware of
intonation in English and taught to imitate intonation patterns. They also need to be able to
interpret them and use them appropriately, which is much more difficult.
Most explanations and descriptions are felt to be rather complicated. Accent and intonation seem
sometimes to be a kind of final frontier which many otherwise highly competent foreign speakers
seem unable to cross.
Some might be tempted to question the importance of the subject of intonation in the first place,
and yet it is practically impossible to pronounce words in sentences correctly, and at a more
complex level, read a text in such a way as to bring out the meaning, without some kind of
understanding of the system of word accent, word prominence, weak forms, rhythm, and
intonation. Adamczewski and Keen quote Lloyd James to support their insistence on the
importance of intonation:
Rhythm and intonation are even more important than accuracy in the use of individual sounds.
Rhythm is a critical factor of intelligibility and inability to reproduce English rhythm is one of the
most frequent reasons why foreigners are misunderstood. The intonation pattern is as essential to
intelligibility as the rhythm. (A&K, p223)
It is also suggested that lack of familiarity with the system of giving prominence to certain words or
parts of words in discourse and reducing the effort made in the pronunciation of the rest may hinder
oral comprehension for foreign students when they are first exposed to authentic speakers in real
situations.
Another good reason for encouraging a good feeling for intonation is that inappropriate use of
intonation patterns might more easily lead to misunderstandings than, say, incorrect pronunciation
of particular phonemes. (see O'Connor, chap1) A clearly foreign pronunciation will usually
instantly recognised as such, and so long as it does not hinder comprehension will not be much of a
handicap. An inappropriate intonation pattern might not, on the other hand, be so readily identified
as such, and who knows what the unfortunate results might be! A speaker might appear downright
rude, simply because his intonation was wrong. Intonation is a social phenomenon at least as much
as other linguistic phenomena, and in fact often mirrors social behaviour patterns, such as
dominance (see Brazil). This is what OConnor says (pp 1&2) :
the use of tune which is not usually used in English will give a foreign accent to the speech and
may make understanding difficult; secondly, and more serious, the use of a tune which is used in
English but in different circumstances will lead to misunderstandings and possible embarrassment.
As an example of this latter kind of danger, the phrase Thank you may be said with one kind of tune
which makes it sound genuinely grateful, and with a different tune which makes it sound rather
casual. [i.e. if it falls it sounds genuine, if it rises it sounds casual] etc.
Finally, if this need to be constantly aware of pitch changes and intonation patterns seems a
daunting prospect, imagine what a problem pitch must be for foreign learners of tone languages.
To take the example of Cantonese, the syllable 'fan' said with a high falling tone means 'divide'; said
with five other tones it means 'powder', 'sleep', 'burn', 'courageous', and 'duty' respectively.
(Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 17, p772, 'Phonetics')
2. A system
Intonation is only a part of a system of phenomena which are used to present oral discourse in a
certain way. We instinctively (?) package information in such a way as to make the task of our
listener(s) easier. (I exclude situations in which the maxim of cooperation is for some reason not
respected - for example in deliberately misleading discourse.) In written English, we use
punctuation, amongst other tools, to package information. We can also underline, use capitals, bold
type, indent, etc.. The spoken language has its bold type too. But at a more mundane (?) level it has
a system of packaging and presentation which is perhaps more comprehensive than the system
available in the written medium.
2.1. (Word) accent and Prominence
Clearly there are certain words in our utterances which are more important, more significant than
others. Imagine a group of people who are trying to remember the street scene at the time when an
accident took place. One of them succeeds in bringing part of the scene to mind. In his mind's eye he
sees a photographer standing on the pavement at the intersection of two streets. He announces:
There was a photographer at the corner of the street. (An example used by, I think, Gimson
during a short course in the teaching of English to foreign students in Paris in 1973). Now what is
really salient in this utterance in the context? Certainly not, for example, the use of the past tense
of the verb to be. His listeners know the time reference. The main purpose of his utterance is to
apprise his listeners of the presence of a photographer, and, perhaps secondarily, of his
whereabouts. Corners are usually where things are at (unless they are around them, but I think
that as this is less usual the word around or round would be given prominence), and the
relationship of streets to corners, or corners to streets, is not likely to trouble our speaker's
audience. In an impressionistic translation of the sentence he uses, the meaning is photographer
corner street - a sentence not unlikely in pidgin (?). I am sure that if, in a relatively noisy pub,
someone said: Hum hum hum photographer hum hum corner hum hum street, it would be
interpreted in its full form, and the listener might well be unaware that words or sounds other than
there, was, a, at, the of, and the had been used. Provided, of course, that the other
rules of the system are respected, particularly rhythm, and that the hums were more like gruff
grunts than carefully pronounced hums.
There are in fact even more opportunities for gruff grunts or their rather more (but only slightly
more) articulate forms which are usually preferred. Two of the three words which were identified as
being salient contain more than one syllable, and polysyllabic words contain accented and
unaccented syllables. The choice of syllables depends on a certain number of fixed rules, and in
this case it is the second syllable of photographer and the first syllable of corner which must be
accented. The vowels of the others will be reduced, if not to gruff grunts in noisy pubs, to their
weak form. I would not go so far as to say that grunt grunt grunt grunt to grunt grunt grunt grunt
corn grunt grunt grunt street would be intelligible, but I wouldn't bet too much money on it, if an
experiment were to be mounted to test it.
2.2. Tone groups and tone group boundaries
Tone groups are groups of words which form a kind of chunk of information. They usually
contain one or two prominent words. The choice of which word should be given prominence is
something that speakers make as a result of their constant concern to package information. It
would be communicationally counter-productive to give prominence to words which, to a certain
extent, go without saying, or have already been said, as I mentioned in Word accent and
prominence.
2.3. New, Given, (and contrastive?)
However tempting it might be on occasions, it would be disastrous if we always treated our
listeners as idiots. Flogging dead horses is not only pointless, it is time-consuming.
2.4. Intonation to indicate whether utterance is finished or not
A fairly classic system, in which you rise to show you haven't finished (e.g. in a list), and fall to
end. Of course there are a whole series of reasons which might make a speaker rise at the end of an
utterance. This is usually meant to indicate that the discourse process is not finished, or at least that
is the indication or invitation that he wishes to convey.
2.5. Reading Intonation
In reading there is probably no direct or immediate interaction with other people. There is however
a relationship between the reader and his text (and the people he is reading to). Incidentally I am
sure that a proper understanding of intonation facilitates reading alone, or whatever the opposite
of reading aloud should be. Readers will in particular go to some considerable effort to package
the material to show what is new, what is given, what is placed in contrast, and so on. He will
indicate whether a sentence, idea, clause or what-have-you is finished or not. We will return to this
when we come to consider an example towards the end of this chapter.
2.6. Conversational intonation
Intonation obviously has a rle to play in signalling the way in which speakers wish their sentences
to be interpreted. Obvious examples of this are intonation patterns used to distinguish otherwise
identical questions and statements. This is particularly so of question tags, where a distinction has
to be made as to whether the speaker is simply asserting something and seeking confirmation, which
he expects, or is suggesting something rather tentatively and seeking his interlocutor's opinion
(which may of course also turn out to be confirmation). I will return to this topic later, as I wish to
raise a few fundamental questions regarding the usual guidelines regarding intonation as a function of
sentence type (question, statement, exclamation, ). In particular, I would like to ask What is a
question? I am reminded of a possibly apocryphal but nonetheless apposite story concerning an
Oxford University Philosophy exam. The question set was, Is this a question?. The highest marks
were given to the student who wrote: If this is an answer, then yes.
2.7. Attitudinal functions of Intonation
Brazil et al suggest that it might be pedagogically preferable to teach the overall meaning of different
intonation patterns rather than to adopt the O'Connor type approach, which gives a large number
of possible attitudinal readings or intentions for each intonation sequence. These readings depend
also on whether the utterance considered is a question (yes/no or WH-), exclamation, statement etc.
There is a lot of useful information in O'Connor, but it is true that the mass of information is rather
difficult to digest and use. The suggestion that teachers should present wider meanings for
intonation patterns, which can then be interpreted to fit particular cases, is attractive. It also seems
to fit in with the current trend of linguistics, which, I think, is towards the identification of basic
meanings or explanations. Though this kind of approach does not, in grammar for example,
remove the need to talk of exceptions, it shifts the perception we have of these exceptions. A
given utterance or structure which does not appear to fit in with what we might have expected will
be interpreted as having been selected by the speaker/writer as such. Rules are made to be broken.
By breaking them we can multiply the possibilities the language can offer us. In any case, this
breaking of the rules will be interpreted by the listener/reader as a function of wider rules of
language use. I refer to what Grice labels Conversational maxims (the French prefer to talk about
laws, lois du discours - is this a reflection of a difference between the Anglo-Saxon and Latin
reactions to laws?).
What Brazil et al refer to when they make this suggestion (p99) is the rise-fall pattern, which
O'Connor calls the jack-knife. They call it p+. p means proclaimed (see New, Given,
etc.), the + means that the speaker gives it more than simple proclaimed value; he also gives
something of his relationship to what he says. Brazil et al say he is showing that what he is
proclaiming (i.e. presenting as new to his interlocutor) is new to him too. This, of course, can be
used in several ways. It does not necessarily mean that it IS new to him. I think that this kind of
approach can usefully be adopted in place of (at least as far as teaching is concerned), the fuller, but
rather more confusing O'Connor classification. Here are a few examples from O'Connor.
Have you heard about Pat? ^Yes!
The intonation pattern ^ (rise-fall) is identified as showing that the speaker is quietly impressed,
perhaps awed.
Why don't you like it? I ^do.
Here the use of rise-fall intonation expresses a challenging or censorious attitude.
Other attitudes associated with this intonation pattern: impressed, favourably or unfavourably,
by something not entirely expected, complacent, self-satisfied, or smug, disclaiming
responsibility, shrugging aside any involvement, or refusing to be embroiled. Brazil et al write,
what is common to all of them is the speaker's indication, (whether truthful or not does not
matter), that something, whether the fact or the event, or the fact of someone having said or asked
such a thing, is new to him. (p99) (Take for example the classic case of deliberate breaking of the
conversational maxims, that is irony or sarcasm: if a speaker informs his interlocutor of something,
and the interlocutor wishes to point out sarcastically that this piece of information is hardly new,
since everybody knows it (except his rather slow friend!), he might choose to use the into nation
pattern reserved for genuinely expressing that the information is new, the rise-fall in question -
^Really!. O'Connor identifies smugness, which is somewhat similar.)
One of the differences between O'Connor's approach and that of Brazil et al. is that while O'Connor
identifies a certain number of intonation patterns to which he then adds comments on their
attitudinal function, Brazil et al. define language functions to which intonation patterns are then
ascribed.
3. O'Connor and Arnold
Before going any further I would like to present one of the most successful books on intonation,
O'Connor and Arnold's Intonation of Colloquial English, 2nd edition, Longman, 1973. (First
edition 1961). I would like to make it clear that if hereafter I refer to this work considerably in my
criticism of intonation teaching, it is because it is one of the best available. It is an excellent
presentation of English intonation. My criticism is basically that it is not usable as a first teaching
method. This may not have been their intention anyway, though I think it was.
4. A critique of current intonation teaching
One criticism of current intonation teaching, (apart from criticism of its absence), concerns the
complexity of some of the methods available, to which I alluded in my introduction. It is, I feel,
almost impossible to expect students to learn all the attitudes that for example Arnold and
O'Connor identify for each of the sentence classes in each of the tone groups. Furthermore, while
there is no doubt that all of O'Connor and Arnold's attitudes are possible, it is often context and
discourse situation rather than any strictly defined relationship between intonation and meaning that
finally enables an interpretation of the attitude to be made.
Another criticism I would make is that the information is not presented in the most helpful way for
a student wishing to produce spoken English. The information is structured around the ten tone
groups. This is all very well, but foreign learners are confronted with quite the opposite input.
They have ideas which they want or need to express, they arrange sentences to do so, and they need
to know how to organise them in speech. It would be interesting to create a kind of expert system
of the kind that computer programmers use. What the student needs is an algorithm. To do this we
would need to decide exactly what the input is. Which words in the sentence carry the salient
lexical or syntactic information? (and therefore, is our utterance prompted by a statement, question
or whatever from our interlocutor, or even a particular situation?) How much of it is new
information and how much is given? Do we wish to impose our point of view on our listener, or
do we want to encourage some reaction on his part? etc, etc .
Another difficulty arises from the (necessarily?) blurred classifications into which sentences are
distributed. For O'Connor and Arnold these are; Statements, WH-Questions, Yes-No questions,
Commands, and Interjections. The authors do of course realise this. For example p51 Questions
beginning with 'Will you ' are more often than not imperatives, and very strong ones at that.
Examples 'Will you be quiet!' (with a high head on will and a low fall on quiet) or 'Will you stop
pestering me!' (with a high head beginning on will and a low fall on pestering). It would be a bold
child who would dare to answer either question! They point out that many (negative) yes/no
questions are in fact exclamatory, as in 'Isn't it wonderful!' or 'Haven't they made a mess of it!' Both
these imperative and exclamatory questions can be pronounced with a low drop. O'Connor and
Arnold do not, incidentally, mention rhetorical questions which can also be pronounced with a low
drop. For example: Are the people prepared to put up with it? I suggest that they are not, and
(bla bla bla). How much simpler it would be to say that utterances which have a low termination
like these deliberately exclude any solicitation of the interlocutor, except the exclamatory questions
which are often the occasion for verbal nodding (Isn't it wonderful? - Oh yes, it's absolutely
super!), in other words a second exclamation, echoing the first. Of course I am not suggesting that
nothing else can follow the sentences in question. Children can (and often do!) answer back. People
can counter exclamatory phrases. (Isn't it wonderful! - You call that wonderful! I've never seen
such a etc. - and note that in this case no would be quite inappropriate - very surly?, and yes as
a genuine answer and not an echoing interjection would be most curious).
All this is no doubt a very interesting debate, but it only makes things even more complicated for
the student. Why not, I hear you ask, start off with a classification based on discourse function?
(And what intonation would you give to that sentence! {and incidentally that one too!}).
5. The Brazil et al. model
A lot of what I am saying is inspired by an apparently attractive and pedagogically realistic
explanation or model of intonation expounded in Discourse Intonation and Language Teaching by
David BRAZIL, Malcolm COULTHARD and Catherine JOHNS. - Longman, 1980.
6. Teaching intonation - suggestions
One fundamental concept to be borne in mind is the importance of context. Intonation is a function
of discourse, rather than purely grammatical or attitudinal factors. It follows that intonation can
only be presented and explained by using relatively long units of discourse, either freely
conversational or more controlled, as for example, television interviews or round tables, lectures, or
readings of written English. By relatively long I mean that I believe it is preferable (essential?) to
avoid single sentences out of context, and that, at least at the presentation and explanation stage,
recordings of one or two minutes in length, say a half to a full typewritten page (not too dense
though), would be best.
7. Examples
I would like you to listen to a conversation and a reading of a written text. Can we identify the
intonation patterns? What purpose do they serve? (not yet )