Tone Shift

Languages have special forms called anaphoric words to express what has already been mentioned. (See Section 10.3.) 10.1 The structure of a tone unit In speech meanings are communicated not merely by what is said but also by the way it is said. We humans have invented ways of preserv-ing our sayings through writing, but the writing systems that we have do not reflect all that is present in speech. Writing indicates consonant and vowel phonemes with some degree of accuracy, but no language has a writing system that adequately represents the rhythms and melodies of our utterances. Punctuation marks, italics, and under-lining are crude ways of trying to represent these prosodic elements that provide nuances of meaning in what we say. If prosodic elements have a role in communication, then they must be shared by members of the language community. There are personal differences in the ways that people speak, and there are dialect differences, but there are also ways of talking which are common to all speakers of the language. By using differences in the ‘tone of voice’ we convey different messages which, by and large, are recognized and reacted to by all speakers of the language. These ways of using the voice form the prosody, or prosodic system, of English. An utterance can be quite short, consisting of a single tone unit, even just one word, but most utterances consist of several tone units. When we speak, unless we are reciting from a prepared script, we all make slips of the tongue, hesitate, repeat, and have to make corrections but in general we manage to deliver the message we intend. Similarly, we understand what others have to say in spite of their linguistic lapses. As pointed out in Chapter 3, when we listen to someone talking (in a language we know), we don’t simply hear one sound after another nor even one word after another; we unconsciously organize the message into units of information, tone units, which reflect the grammatical structure of the utterance