Tone and Word Choice

3 Key excerpts on "Tone and Word Choice"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Routledge Handbook of African Linguistics

  • Augustine Agwuele, Adams Bodomo(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The following are some definitions or statements about what a ‘tone language’ is. I am quoting several authors from works written long ago, whereby it is clear that each one was influenced by their own experience. Over time, a progression can be noticed in understanding of what a tone language is. One of the pioneers in the field of tone studies, Kenneth Pike (1948: 3), defined a tone language as “a language having lexically significant, contrastive, but relative pitch on each syllable.” William Welmers (1959: 2; 1973: 80) defined a tone language as “a language in which both pitch phonemes and segmental phonemes enter into the composition of at least some morphemes.” The following three authors have defined what a tone language is in the context of a language description. Ida C. Ward (1936: 10), who wrote on Ibo (Nigeria), concluded that “A tone language, therefore, is one in which every word in the language has its own individual tone or tone pattern.” J.P. Crazzolara (1938: 13) wrote in A Study of the Acooli Language (a Nilotic language spoken in Uganda) that the language “makes use of tone or pitch as an essential element or part of its words, verbal forms, and grammar in general.” Finally, in The Phonetics of the Hottentot Language, Beach (1938) says: “By a tone is meant the relative pitch of any significant speech-element chosen as a unit.” He then states that Hottentot has both monosyllabic and disyllabic roots, and that “the number of inherent tones of both monosyllabic and disyllabic roots is identical. A tone, in Hottentot, may therefore be defined as the relative pitch of a root.” The authors of these works already had profound insights in the tone systems of the languages they studied. Since then, many articles and books have appeared with studies on tone in a variety of languages. These have greatly increased our understanding of the nature and function of tone

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  The Sounds of Language

  An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology

  • Elizabeth C. Zsiga(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Intonation can be defined as the use of pitch and other suprasegmental features to convey discourse-level meaning. Intonation is similar to tone in that the same variable, pitch, is manipulated. It is different from tone, however, in the type of meaning that is conveyed. In intonation, a word’s lexical reference is not changed by the pitch pattern, but the status of the item in the discourse is changed: the lexical referent may be asserted, queried, questioned with incredulity, brought into focus, or backgrounded, depending on the pitch pattern used. The sentences in example (40), modified from the example from Chapter 4 in order to include more sonorant sounds, illustrate three different intonational contours in English.

  (40) Intonation in English:

  a.  “You’re a werewolf?”

  b.  “I’m a werewolf.”

  c.  “A werewolf ? I thought you were a vampire!”

  In each case, the word “werewolf” receives a distinctive pitch pattern. Figures 17.5 , 17.6 , and 17.7 show pitch tracks for the word “werewolf” extracted from each of these utterances.

  Figure 17.5  Pitch track for werewolf? (example 40a).

  Figure 17.6  Pitch track for werewolf (example 40b).

  Figure 17.7  Pitch track for werewolf?!? (example 40c).

  In example (40a) and Figure 17.5 , rising pitch indicates a yes/no question; in example (40b) and Figure 17.6 , falling pitch indicates a statement; and in example (40c) and Figure 17.7 , a complex rise-fall-rise pattern signals surprise. In each case, however, the lexical item referred to remains the same: a lycanthrope. This can be compared to tone languages like Thai, where [na:] with falling pitch means face , but [na:] with rising pitch means thick .

  Intonation is like tone, however, in that the relationship between pitch and meaning is linguistically structured and language specific. Intonation is not the direct expression of emotion in the voice (though such expression does of course occur). There do seem to be some universal, non-accidental properties to intonation: cross-linguistically, low or falling pitch is associated with assertion and finality, while higher pitch is associated with non-finality, uncertainty, a topic that remains “up in the air.” Languages differ, however, in how these tendencies are implemented. In Thai and Yoruba, for example, questions have higher pitch over the whole course of the utterance, the entire tone pattern raised a notch, instead of an English-like rise at the end. All languages, including tone languages, use intonation.

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  Emotional Expression

  • G. Collier, Gary James Collier(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  7 Tone of Voice

  Speech consists of three components, grammar, content, and tone of voice. While these occur simultaneously during normal interaction, they can be (artificially) separated by omitting information. Vocal cues include those aspects of speech that are lost when a message is transcribed from spoken to written form. Punctuation and italics represent a crude attempt to maintain aspects of voice in written form, but these capture only a few of the numerous changes occurring during normal conversation.

  Grammatical cues are lost when statements are paraphrased. Here the meaning remains constant, but the structures of the sentences are changed. The sentence "I gave her the book," for example, can be rephrased in the passive form, "She was given the book by me," which retains each of the essential elements but alters the position of the three nouns (she, book, and I/me). Subtle variations such as these change the emphasis and frequently the direction of the action (e.g., from active to passive) but are usually recognized as variations of the same sentence or deep structure (see Chomsky, 1957, 1965).

  Verbal content is therefore that aspect of speech that remains after a message has been transcribed and paraphrased. This component contains the meaning itself—what is said as opposed to how something is said. The focus may be on either the manifest content, where terms are taken at their face value, or the latent content, which is concerned with underlying themes. Subtle aspects of verbal content, such as substitutions of words, slips, and frequent themes, may reflect feelings and attitudes even when a person does not mean to communicate them, and a careful analysis of speech may uncover hidden meanings that elude even the speaker.

  Vocal changes are often treated as a nonverbal component because they have the same intrinsic relationship with emotions as other nonverbal channels. Grammatical features and verbal content, on the other hand, seem to represent a higher-order, secondary attempt to put feelings and ideas into words. What a person says may or may not represent true feelings—language can be used to mislead as well as enlighten (oneself and others)—but a person's tone of voice is often seen as a more accurate representation of what the person feels. When verbal and vocal features contradict each other, listeners will usually pay more attention to the voice and discount the verbal message (see Chapter 10

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