Intonation (linguistics)

Intonation in linguistics a portion or feature of the prosody. In phonetics, intonation is meant by the perceived temporal evolution of the pitch within a word (word melody ), rate or speech act. Intonation is often mistakenly equated with the prosody, however, is in the strict sense only a part of it.

Synonyms with different focus

When speaking of speech melody, the focus is placed on the intonation as a linguistic property. Speaking of prosody, the change in pitch of a sentence is meant as a dialogue section. The vocal line emphasizes that humans can control the prosodic characteristics of the language consciously.

Linguistic Definition

In the lexicon of the language sciences Bussmann defines intonation as follows:

Intonation (from Latin intonare, sing ' to Latin tonare, thunder ')

1 In a broader sense: all of the prosodic properties of phonetic utterances ( syllables, words, phrases) that are not tied to a single sound ( this definition is similar to the definition of prosody ). The intonation is based on the interaction of:

• Accent (also: accent) by increased pressure ( sound intensity or loudness) on a syllable.
• In pitch
• Pause structure, but this is hard to grasp, regardless of accent and pitch curve.

This definition shows that often synchronous occurrence of prosodic characteristics of the language.

2 In the narrow sense (especially in Slavic ): on morphologically defined units ( syllables, words ) related phenomena of the pitch curve.

Mikroprosodie and Makroprosodie

In phonetics, the differentiation of the micro-and Makroprosodie important. Here, under Mikroprosodie be understood changes in the fundamental frequency variation, which does not control the speaker willingly. Such changes may be due about the anatomy of the vocal tract, so is approximately known that different vowels in the context of it engendering articulatory configuration have an intrinsic pitch.

Under Makroprosodie the changes in the fundamental frequency variation are understood to be produced by the speaker aware of. It is these changes that are linguistically more important. Many approaches in intonation research, such as the Johan 't Hart et al. developed IPO model or developed by Janet Pierrehumbert Tonsequenzmodell to go from a finite amount of intonational structures within a language, comparable to phonemes, from which certain rules are used by the speaker below.

In relation to an examination of the significance of intonation contours, such as a possible distinction between " question contours ", " Rufkonturen " and comparing items, of course, is primarily the study of the Makroprosodie important.

Intonation types

"Rising intonation " means that the pitch of the voice rises, " falling intonation " means that it drops. In addition to the height of the clay can also be important, in particular the length thereof. The durations of a language are classified as Chroneme.

Function of intonation

Some languages ​​use intonation syntactically, for example to express surprise or irony and to distinguish question and answer sets from each other. Among these languages ​​German and English ( " Oh, really? "). In other languages ​​the change of the pitch changes the meaning of individual words or phrases.

Languages ​​in which we distinguish syllables after the pitch is called tonal languages. A distinction is made between languages ​​in which the fundamental frequency variation on the syllable is of importance, the so-called Konturtonsprachen and the languages ​​in which only one of several pitch is crucial, the so-called Registertonsprachen. The former include, for example, Chinese, Lao, and Thai. As an example of the latter is called Hausa. An intermediate position between tonal languages ​​and print accent languages ​​languages ​​play a with a dynamic and melodic accent, such as Swedish, Serbian or Ripuarian - Limburg. In some languages ​​, such as in West African languages ​​Twi and Bini, the pitch has no lexical, but a grammatical function. In these languages, a different tense is indicated by high or low tones.

Linguistic models of intonation

Intonation can be modeled in different ways. This phonological phenomena are described which ( the counterpart to the pitch curve in the signal processing ) of a speech pattern can be found in the fundamental frequency contour. Be modeled mostly Accents ( peaks and valleys ), boundary slopes and intonation resets (pitch reset ). Accents can be described on syllables, words, phrases and sentence level. In addition, in some models, other prosodic features such as pause durations and speech rate are taken into account.

Examples of intonation models:

• The tone - sequence model ( autosegmental - metrical model of intonation ) by Pierrehumbert (1980 ) ToBI ( basic framework for individual linguistic elaborations such as German Tones and Break Indices for the pronunciation of standard German )