Tone & Intonation

Tone
• Linguistic uses of pitch (f0) gestures

• Two contrasting tones (or pitch gestures): H, L

• Complex tonal patterns can be decomposed into

sequences of H and L.

• Tones and sequences can be associated with:

• syllables

• words

• phrases
Assignment to Syllables: Register Tones
• can be used to contrast lexical items
• used in a majority of the world’s languages

Yoruba (Nigeria)
Shona (Zimbabwe)

Bini (Nigeria)

up to 5 contrastive tone types: how do they result from H, L??

Assignment of Tone Sequences to Syllables:
Contour Tones
• Tonal sequence can contrast lexical items
Standard Chinese
 Assignment of Tone Sequences to
Words: Pitch Accents
• Words can contrast in terms of pitch gestures
assigned to them, but not every syllable can
independently bear pitch gestures.
Croatian • Words contrast in accent type: 2
sequences of pitch gestures.

• Early rise (L+H* L-L%) /mlada/ 'the

bride'

• Late rise (L*+H L-L%) /mara/ proper

name (‘Mara’)

• Patterns are "strung out" over

words of 2- or 3- syllable words.

• In a syllable tone language, there

could be 8 contrastive tonal
patterns on 3-syllable words. In
Serbo-Croatian, there are only
Assignment of Tones & Sequences to Phrases:
Intonation
• No contrast of words

• Uses:

• discourse information

• question, statement, command

• focus What did the squirrel do?

—The squirrel ate a nut.
Did the squirrel eat a leaf?
—No, the squirrel ate a nut.

• syntax and boundary marking

"light-house keeping" vs. "light house-keeping”

"1 + (3 *2)" ... = 7

"(1 + 3) * 2" ... = 8
 ToBI system of Intonation description
• Pitch accents (tones & sequences): 

Every phase has at least one.

• Final one is called the "nuclear" accent.

H*
• (Partial) Inventory of pitch accents: L*
L+H*
• starred tone is coordinated with stressed vowel L*+H
H + !H*
• !H means lowered H

• Phrase accents
 H-
Can be added to the "nuclear" accent. L-

• Boundary tones
H%
• Final rising or falling pitch L%
 Example of ToBI
H* L-L% L* L-H%

statement address

L* H-H% L+H* L-H%

puzzlement
question

L+H* L-L%
reprimand
 Tone Gesture Control
H L

• Increase in longitudinal • Decrease in vertical tension

tension
• Produced by increasing angle
between cricoid and thyroid
cartilages
produced by lowering entire
larynx.
• Action of the sterno-hyoid
muscles

• Action of crico-thyroid
muscles
 Cantonese Tones
• Four pitch levels 200
High
• Nissenbaum (2010)
hypothesized they are 150

Pitch (Hz)
produced with a 2x2
combination of 100
Low
• Larynx Height (SH)
(“register”) 50
0
0.25
0.24
0.23
0.2 Time (ms) 250
0.48
0.45
0.49
0.5

• CT Stretching Time (s)

Nissenbaum, J., ”Articulatory vs. acoustic representation of tone”. Poster

presented at the 12th conference on Laboratory Phonology, University of New
Mexico, Albuquerque, July 8–10, 2010.
 Cine-MRI evidence: extreme tones

Male speaker age 20! Upper and Lower extreme tones ! !

UPPER
UPPER register, HIGH tone LOWER register, LOW tone (“high m

Hi Larynx Lo Larynx
Stretched Short Folds
 Mid tones
• In running speech, the f0 of the two middle tones
are not distinct, but they are produced with distinct
gesture combinations.
! ! ! ! Mid tones
/u3/ UPPER mid-tone /u6/ LOWER mid-tone Sum
vocal fold length = 17.7 mm vocal fold length = 19.7 mm
posterior vertical dist. from top = 127.7 mm posterior vertical dist. from top = 132 mm

! Tone
High Larynx Low Larynx
Short folds Stretched folds • F
t

! Mid-
• C

• F

• Difference in vocal fold length between tones 3 and 6 for this subject is 2 mm
(i.e. vocal folds are 11% longer at onset of tone 6 than at onset of tone 3)
• Difference in vertical position is 4.3 mm (i.e. larynx lowers by nearly 1/2 cm
for tone 6)