The importance of intonation in social interaction

TURN-TAKING: Giving the floor to another person or taking your turn in a conversation: rise and fall are used as a signal for
when to speak and when not. Remain at a high pitch if you want to continue talking. A fall shows completion. (See Brazil)

INFORMATION STRUCTURE (See O'Connor): Major stress items pick out the most important words in the sentence:
they point to the new/unknown information in the sentence. Michael Halliday has done most work on this.

Note that one function of intonation is stress. The tonic (stressed item) is the item which has the greatest amount of
pitch movement on it.

Implications for teaching English pronunciation

Many linguists and teachers suggest that teachers should focus on teaching STRESS rather than RISE & FALL since there
is a massive difference between how one person and another perceives an utterance. You need a machine to determine whether
it's a rise or a fall.

At higher levels - for example, pronunciation sessions for learners involved in the language of negotiation or presentation in
fields such as business or education, emphasis should also be given to TOPIC STRUCTURE - also related to turn-taking.
Topic Switching: Start high. When people switch tack, they mark it with their voice.

Teaching intonation - the theories behind intonation

Definitions

1. Tone - the rise and fall of the voice. Tune/Pitch variation. An oscilloscope will give an oscillograph of speech. The
frequency will be shown by the closeness of the waves (high frequency will be shown by waves which are closer together).

2. The volume (strength of signal) will be shown by the height of the waves. The height of the note depends on the speed of
opening and closing of the vocal cords. More vibrations of the larynx (up to 800 per sec) show up more compact waves.

In linguistics, intonation is variation of pitch while speaking which is not used to distinguish words. (Compare tone.)
Intonation and stress are two main elements of linguistic prosody.

All languages use pitch semantically, that is, as intonation, for instance for emphasis, to convey surprise or irony, or to
pose a question. Tonal languages such as Chinese and Hausa use pitch to distinguish words in addition to intonation.

Generally speaking, we can identify the following intonations:

• Rising Intonation means the pitch of the voice increases over time [↗];
• Falling Intonation means that the pitch decreases with time [↘];
• Dipping Intonation falls and then rises [↘↗];
• Peaking Intonation rises and then falls [↗↘].

The classic example of intonation is the question-statement distinction. For example, northeastern American English, like
very many languages (Hirst & DiCristo, eds. 1998), has a rising intonation for echo or declarative questions (He found it
on the street?), and a falling intonation for wh- questions (Where did he find it?) and statements (He found it on the
street.). Yes or no questions (Did he find it on the street?) often have a rising end, but not always. Some languages like
Chickasaw and Kalaallisut have the opposite pattern: rising for statements and falling with questions.

Dialects of British and Irish English vary substantially,[1] with rises on many statements in urban Belfast, and falls on
most questions in urban Leeds.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, "global" rising and falling intonation are marked with a diagonal arrow rising
left-to-right [↗] and falling left-to-right [↘], respectively. These may be written as part of a syllable, or separated with a
space when they have a broader scope:

He found it on the street?

 [ hiː ˈfaʊnd ɪt | ɒn ðə ↗ˈˈstɹiːt ‖ ]

Here the rising pitch on street indicates that the question hinges on that word, on where he found it, not whether he found
it.

Yes, he found it on the street.

[↘ˈjɛs ‖ hi ˈfaʊnd ɪt | ɒn ðə ↘ˈstɹiːt ‖ ]
How did you ever escape?
[↗ˈˈhaʊ dɪdjuː | ˈɛvɚ | ɨ↘ˈˈskeɪp ‖ ]

Here, as is common with wh- questions, there is a rising intonation on the question word, and a falling intonation at the
end of the question.

Those with congenital amusia show impaired ability to discriminate, identify and imitate the intonation of the final words
in sentences