Week 9: Intonation

For this week, I focus my deliberate practice on intonation in Received Pronunciation. The same as prominence, intonation is also used by native speakers of English to emphasize important information in their utterances. Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin (2010) highlight that prominence and intonation is actually interact with each other in that the change of prominence in an utterance also changes the intonation pattern of the utterance. Before I started my practice, I reviewed the theories about intonation first for it would make it easier for me to hear it. 

Talking about intonation means talking about pitch, which Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin (2010) put it as "the relative highness or lowness of the speaker's voice"  similar to musical pitch do, re, and mi (p.230). They distinguish 4 levels of pitch in English:

4 = extra high
3 = high
2 = middle
1 = low 

Usually, level 4 pitch is only used when someone has a strong feeling of something such as when she/he is surprised, enthusiastic, or in disbelief; and it is also often used in contrastive and emphatic stress. One alternates from low to high pitch, but she/he usually ends the utterance either using low or high pitch. One thing that I thing should be noted here is that intonation in English does not change the meaning of the word, unlike tonal language such as Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese in which the same word with different tone will carry different meaning. Instead, in English, changes in intonation will only reflect different discourse context of the utterance or even simply a word. The following example can help our understanding on pitch and intonation:

Question:    Now? --> produced with rising pitch signifies a question
Command:  Now! --> produced with falling pitch signifies a command

or 

Statement:   She's gone --> produced with falling pitch signifies a statement
Question:     She's gone --> produced with rising pitch signifies a question

People can also use intonation to show they emotion. The examples given by Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin (2010) are different emotion that can be shown with the word great as follows:

perfunctory  --> produced with only slightly falling intonation or neutral
enthusiasm  --> produced with broader movement from high to low intonation
sarcasm      --> flatter intonation that may signify disinterest, or even sarcasm

When analyzing my archetype, I realized that the woman in my archetype mostly employed the intonation pattern for statement since she is reading a story of out a text. Here is my transcription for her intonation patterns:

and here is my recording for this week after several practice on intonation patterns:

For next week, I will focus my practice on the segmental features or Received Pronunciation.