CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE
A PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO
ENGLISH INTONATION
A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction
of the requirements for the degree
of Master of Arts in
Linguistics
by
Kathleen Bardovi
June, 1978
The Thesis of Kathleen Bardovi is approved:
Iris Shah
bate)
Mahlon Ga1.m1er,
aiiPersorl
California State University, Northridge
To my grandparents:
Benjamin, Berniece,
Elie, and Regina
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful for the help, encouragement, and
criticisms from my advisors, Professors Mahlon Gaumer,
Iris Shah, and Paul Kirk.
I am indebted to my committee
who guided this material to its present formi the shortcomings, however, are my
o~tn.
I will always appreciate
the advice, thoughtful criticism, and time they gave to
this study.
I would also like to express my thanks to
Professor Robert Oliphant who was always available to
discuss my work and give helpful suggestions.
To Professor Jacqueline Lindenfeld, I owe my
enthusiasm, who through her own scholarship taught me
not only linguistic concepts, but the love of the field
as well.
The topic of this thesis was born in a seminar
conducted by Professor Lindenfeld and nurtured by support from faculty and students.
To all those who lent
their native speaker intuitions to judge a.nd produce
countless intonations I am also grateful.
i'!J
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS • •
.. ......
~
• . . iv
ABSTRACT . • • •
• vi
INTRODUCTION •
1
CHAPTER ONE
INTONATION:
A SURVEY OF DEFINITIONS
CHAPTER TWO
G~4AR-BASED
APPROACHES
17
THE STRUCTURAL APPROACH . • • . .
THE TRANSFORMATIONAL-GENERATIVE
APPROACH . . • • • • • • • •
CHAPTER THREE
3
. • 18
. 24
GRAMMAR- INDEPENDENT APPROACHES
. 42
THE ATTITUDINAL APPROACH
THE INFORMATION APPROACH
THE PRAGMATIC APPROACH
. 52
CHAPTER FOUR
THE ESL APPROACH
CHAPTER FIVE
CONCLUSION
42
• • 57
• • • 67
• • 77
• 98
SUMMARY .
100
BIBLIOGRAPHY •
v
ABSTRACT
A PRAGHATIC APPROACH TO
ENGLISH INTONATION
by
Kathleen Bardovi
Master of Arts in Linguistics
Intonation is an omnipresent but elusive
feature of spoken English.
No utterance can occur
without it, and yet intonation has successfully escaped
adequate or accurate description by linguists.
Attempts
at incorporating intonation into various grammars of
English have been hampe-red by its mystique.
The primary
obstacle is that there is no unifonn definition of intonation.
Investigations into the grammatical function of
intonation have dominated the field of study.
Grammar-
based approaches ignore the attitudir.al functions of
intonation and instead investigate the relation of intona-tion contours to syntactic structures.
The approaches
and their contributions to a linguistic theory of intonation are surveyed.
Because of the grcunmarians'
failure to discover systematic relations between either
lexical categories or syntactic structures and intonation contours, some linguists began looking at intonation
from a pragmatic or information theory approach.
The
recent work of linguists is not reflected in the teaching materials available to the instructor of English as
a second language for use in the classroom.
Adopting a
linguistic model which incorporates pragmatic considerations facilitates the investigation of intonation in a
number of ways.
It would be of immeasurable advantage
for the isolation of question intonations, the dissolution of the grammatical/attitudinal boundary, acceptance
of presuppositional gramrnaticality, and the abandonment
of the unnecessary quest for normal intonation.
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this study is to suggest a
conceptual approach to the investigation of intonation
in English.
field.
Many different approaches now divide the
These unnecessary divisions otscure the function
of intonation and retard its study by linguists.
It is
possible to integrate grammar-based and grammarindependent approaches, including the trans£ormationalgenerative, attitudinal, information, and pragmatic approaches, into one stystem.
The framework suggested
here is a linguistic model which includes a pragmatic
component.
This approach attempts to provide a framework
which can account for intonation as it occurs and functions in spoken language.
Within this framework, the speech act is the
optimal unit of investigation of intonation.
The speech
act encompasses the actual utterance, speaker intent,
shared speaker-hearer presuppositions as well as the illocutionary force of the utterance.
The minimal unit
considered in this study is the utterance, a spoken occurrence of any segmental string and its accompanying
intonation.
This contrasts with sentences, written
representations of segmental strings, which are only of
minimal interest here.
This study addresses four trouble
1
2
s;treas in particularr they are:
the isolation of
question intonations, the grammatical-attitudinal conflict, the notion of presuppositional grammaticality,
and the search for normal intonation.
problem
in a pragmatic approach.
None
ra~ains
a
CHAPTER ONE
INTONATION:
A SURVEY OF DEFINITIONS
Intonation is an
omnip~esent
feature of spoken English.
but elusive
No utterance can occur
without it, and yet intonation has successfully escaped
adequate or accurate description by linguists.
Depen-
dence on the written word is an intrinsic feature of a
technologically advanced society.
As essential as it
may be, the written word is not all of language.
By con-
centrating on that which can be represented in standard
orthography linguists have devoted most of their attentions to the segmental features of language.
The lack
of representation of intonation patterns in conventional
~rriting
systems should not mislead the linguist to be-
lieve that intonation is any less a part of language than
that which can be represented.
intonation into various
grru~ars
Attempts at incorporating
of English have been
hampered by its mystique.
In addition to the fact that earlier linguists
have considered intonation to be outside the scope of
linguistic analysis, other obstacles plague current studies.
The
prL11la~y
obstacle is that there is no uniform
definition of intonation.
The word intonation in its
common use has a variety of meanings, and thus is not
3
4
suitable for formal discussions.
The technical term
intonation also has a number of meanings.
Not all inves-
tigators characterize intonation by the same linguistic
features.
It is important to state clearly the formal
notion of intonation being used at the beginning of any
study.
Otherwise, one may understand it to include, or
exclude, any number of language phenomena.
The native speaker-hearer and the linguist
define intonation in different terms.
The speaker rec-
ognizes primarily the attitudinal aspects of intonation;
the linguist realizes that intonation has a grammatical
function in addition to the attitudinal function.
To
the language user intonation is an atti·tude reflector.
It is the tone of voice and manner in which the message
is delivered.
Many linguists consider this paralanguage
and not a linguistic concern.
Speakers recognize that
intonation indicates speaker attitudes because intonation
often enters into those misunderstandings which involve
speaker intentions.
Intonation contributes to the under-
standing of the utterance as do the words themselves.
It is nevertheless fleeting.
After the intonation dis-
appears the meaning of -the utterance is often subject to
reinterpretation.
conwon occurrence.
example.
Several researchers have noted this
Pike (1945) provides an illustrative
Imagine that a person asks, nis breakfast
ready yet?"
(p. 22)
If the speaker asks the question
5
nicely or nastily (Pike's words) the utterance is either
an actual inquiry or an insult.
And, if taken as a
insult, it will receive an appropriate response.
Later
that day, the person might be giving an account of the
morning's events:
"I just asked if breakfast were ready
and she flew into a rage."
(p. 22)
Consider also the
following exchange and how frequently it is heard in
conversation.
A:
B:
A:
I don't like what you said.
What did I say? All I said was. ~ . .
It wasn't what you said, it was your tone
of voice.
The lay definition derives from the speaker's familiarity
with intonation as an attitude reflector as emphasized
by the above examples.
In both, the intonation adds
meaning to the utterances not present in the words alone.
Studying the speaker-hearer's perception and manipulation
of intonation will give the linguist valuable inforrnation; linguists should not underestimate the importance
of investigating intonation in relation to the language
user.
In spite of the fact that there have been
numerous investigations of intonation there is no one
generally accepted, well-formed, inclusive linguistic
definition o£ the phenomenon.
Long before the struc-
turalists' interests led them to approach the topic,
linguists observed and discussed intonation.
Early in
6
linguistic studies .investigators attempted to describe
intonation.
Crystal (1969a) cites Hart's discussions of the
melody in spoken English in The Opening of the Unreasonable Writing of our Inglish Toung (1551) and Orthographie
(1569} as the earliest treatments of intonation.
prestructural treatments followed.
1
Other
These descriptions
were inadequate because of the lack of a cohesive theory
of grammar into which they might have been incorporated.
They remained therefore only descriptions of a corpus,
lists of phenomena devoid of predictive power.
Pike (1945)
is the first American structuralist
to examine the features that make up the prosody of language.
While Pike maintains that intonation is not
related to grammar but only conveys the attitude of the
speaker, a view that is not representative of all the
structuralists, his approach to intonation was and still
is characteristic of the American approach to intonation.
Attempting a phonemic analysis of intonation, as suggested by Bloomfield (1933), Pike (1945) describes intonation contours in terms of four pitch levels and two
types of juncture.
The pitch levels, numbered one to
four, are relative to each other and to the speaker.
Level one is the highest pitch, level four is the lowest.
1For a discussion of prosodic studies in the
nineteenth century see Crystal (1969a, pp. 20-25).
7
According to Pike four levels are sufficient to
accurately account for all the intonation patterns in
English.
His two junctures are the final and non-final
pauses of the sentence.
By establishing the four leveled
approach to intonation, Pike fixed the position of not
only the structuralists, but that of later linguists as
well.
The influence of the four levels of pitch can
also be found inthe work of the generative grammarians.
Stockwell (1960a) was the first to relate
intonation to a transformational-generative model.
He
defines intonation in terms of rules which describe and
predict its occurrence in English.
In spite of Stock-
well's work it was not until the late 60's that other
linguists became interested in including intonation in
a transformational-generative grammar.
For further dis-
cussion see Chapter 2.
While speakers seem to agree on a common
definition of intonation, linguists use the term inconsistently.
Investigators do not agree on the phenomena
being studied.
The views are neither consistent within
the period of the discussions nor among the approaches
taken by the authors.
Regardless of the approach of var-
ious linguists, whether prestructural, structural, transformational, or others, their works all suffer a common
deficiency.
In general, and often in individual works,
intonation is not well defined.
Consequently, many
8
discussions of intonational, be they observational,
theoretical, or intended to instruct as in the case of
ESL/EFL materials, begin with no definition of intonation or terms used regardless of how detailed the study
might be.
Clearly, the study of intonation must develop
an accepted definition of the term.
In forming a defi-
nition, the linguist must consider that the speaker is
aware of the presence and function of intonation and
successfully, perhaps consciously, manipulates it.
The
linguist, however, must go beyond the speaker's awareness
of her/his language.
must be examined:
The existence of other functions
the grammatical function of intona-
tion, that is the relation of intonation to syntactic
structures is one such function which remains to be
thoroughly investigated.
Not enough work has been done
where utterances of speakers have been recorded, dissected, and evaluated.
Researchers must consider per-
ceived and acoustic correlates to intonation patterns.
Once the linguist clearly defines intonation, she can
then incorporate it into a grammar of the language.
This is a long, arduous process.
An examination of the
various definitions demonstrates how much still remains
to be done in this respect.
Most studies identify intonation as a suprasegmentali its domain is greater than a segment.
influence of intonation is not restricted by word
The
'
'
9
boundaries but instead flows over the entire sentence.
Agreement about intonation contours ends here.
tions of intonation fall into two categories:
Definidefini-
tions in terms of form and defnitiions in terms of function.
The definitions based on form characterize
intonation according to pitch, amplitude, duration, tone,
loudness, stress, juncture, and/or a combination of the
above.
Definitions based on function classify intonation
by what it can be said to do in the language.
The definition formulated by Denes and MiltonWilliams (1962) in the discussion of their experiment on
intonation in English is an example of a functional
definition.
One reply to the question "what is intonation?"
is to say that it is a linguistic form in which
information about the speaker's emotional attitude towards his subject matter (e.g., agreement, 4oubt, questioning) is encoded--an attitude not normally expressed in the phonemic
sequences which convey the factual elements of
information about the subject matter.
(p. 2)
Denes and Milton-Williams argue for a definition of
intonation in terms of its function rather than its
acoustic or perceptual form on the basis that the definition needs to be incorporated into a linguistic analysis.
Denes and Milton-Williams assume that a speaker's
attitudes are evident in speech and search for a marker,
intonation, which conveys that information.
They then
attempt to define intonation in terms of its physical
10
manifestations.
In a series of experiments Denes and
Milton-Williams (Denes 1959, Denes & Milton-Williams
1962) begin with a functional definition of intonation
and investigate its form; they seek to discover acoustic
correlates to proposed attitudinal categories.
Functional definitions can characterize the
grammatical as well as the affective aspects of intonation.
Kooij
(1971) defines intonation in terms of syn-
tactic function as well as its auditory features.
He
states that the function of intonation, comprised of the
features of pitch, stress, and duration, is to distinguish utterances, identical in terms of segmental
surface structure, from each other.
This function is
currently the subject of much controversy.
Kooij too
questions that the function of intonation is to distinguish sentences.
Examining samples from Dutch and
English, he concludes that intonation does not disambiguate in the majority of its occurrences.
Kooij
reformulates the definition assigning intonation a dual
function:
"The function of sentence intonation is as
much to indicate syntactic structure as to indicate
discourse function"
(p. 54).
Definitions in terms of form outnumber functional
definitions in the literature.
Among the many definitions
of intonational form one finds diverse and confli±ing
statements.
Definitions of form are given in two distinct
11
categories, in acoustic terms or in auditory/perceptual
terms.
Acoustic terms such as frequency, intensity, and
duration correspond loosely to the perceptual terms pitch,
loudness, and length, respectively.
Stress is often, but
not always, perceived as loudness and is included in the
auditory category.
The chart below gives a sample of the many definitions of intonation in tenus
of form.
The leftmost column specifies the element or elements of intonation; the
author and source of the definition follows.
generally accepted specifications,
The definitions of the elements are the
The rightmost column indicates restrictions on the
terms used by the authors, if any, and the relation of intonation to the suprasegrnentals.
I
The symbols used in the chart are:
= intonation
p = pitch
duration
j
=
juncture
=
length
i
a
=
accent
s
=
stress
t
=
tunes
ld
=
loudness
f
=
frequency
x)y is read:
d
=
=
ln
intensity
x is composed of y, or equivalently,
y is an element of x.
If x)y, z, w then
y, z, vl are the only elements of Xi x is
completely defined by y, z, w.
I-'
N
Defiu.lL1on
ot lntoua.tion in tanns of form
-------·------.--·------~--------
ot I
Rol•tlonuhlp
IHe"'e'•ta of h,tona.t.ion
tunea
the cou.btna.t.ion
o.t
Soua.·ce
Aut hoc
------------·nu~aicAl
•yllablea that
rna.k~:;
l'roiiiiiielillo!!_ IIJ!i'l
Ot
fnglish
-
&) I,
ln, p
up
Jones
tllllltUI
audi~orv
GirdJn.g Cind
Abramson
pw-operty of
---
1------------~r.o~H~nh-!r;t!!!!!
-------·
a aound that en&blee •
ll•temer to place .It on a
aequanctttl o t p 1 tch
That Jntona.tioH of Asher ic4n
!i!!ill.!h
~
the
Am~ci.can
&lJ.eech ti'rator 19-57)
Pike
p.l t.ctu
Rtiatclctiona
on tet.,•
·-H-.i\ua.l of
P.C!IILOr
ton.ea on which we pronoui\CO
th~
ou~
eupcaaagnu.~r.t~tle/
I
•santurt.ce l•\tonat.lou teo•• a
f'UI\Cttono.l Point of View"' ll9b0l
JMoVeHI.~;:Ilt
.. A SLudy of the Petception ot
Smne Atuer.lctt.n Eugllsh Jutouatlon
pitch pattern
of
pitch
_____, ____________________
Co1\Loucu•
:~:1~ w1~~:t f~=al~~ct~9
lip
0965)
6
tt•e acnuetic propeatJ.es 1
euch a• the
fr~quoncv
InLOnbttionj P~rcept1on, aud
!:~!!!.9£
L.l.ellera.rtn
(litch And atreaa ace treated
r -n,,
of
the gound (Lade t'oged
H15l
e~parately
·---------··
Dolinger
lut:onbttlont
I
----------•prouodic f'orra AUd l)J&COUJ'&tt
Function .. (19141)
s.,y
t .:·e.luencitta
aulbclC& M~~tlkf:J thv
reducti01\ 1 p tor 1nveati'J4t lon
allhOH9h r.hev reco~n1¥e 1 to he
hott1 YUtB of
(1~611
Ltber~t~-An
and
iund.:.uli&nla l
-
•ou the Anttotomy of Intonatio-n•
Cohen and
I t Uaa·t
1--
Seltu.:ted Wci!!lliJ.o
liiit:roaiicFron;-tJnr-
~l't!
COI'tl()tex.
C '- lh
0 f, e, tiYle
(~~o:uustie)
i!lll.(1
ld, d (petcc.ptuAl)
I )fo, d, aatllliltud~
l)(.J,
(.. '
1------1
otraaa:a
the f6ubj&ct1ve
b~opreaaion
Kin<JdOo
at proal•\tU\CU.
S.;
-- ·---------------·---··
'!'he Groundwo1·K of £nc.,l is.h
intonatT§!Hsif
-
11•
(scba.erling 19761
tpco•ai,~ence'
tht:J extt:nt
to wtd ch a sound utanj}&
out team ottl&r:tl ~C<UJse
ol ita &jlnorlly. length.
8ll'CBS,
AOd l}itct1)
(l.adefoqed 19151
I
I
-----------------
1-'
w
Detiniticma ot lntonatJona In ttn:aaa of fo.r.a
(cout.inu~d~
--,----------Elea.enta of
tnton~ation
llalationship ot I
aupraseyruaobala/
Source
Author
A Phonol~ aa\d P.roeodr of
iioaor!L~!IiiiiH61
ltutath
pltalt and etreaa
t'uladat~ntal•
Lang ackee
of
Li~itt.tlc
Knalyala Tfi'ln--
--
Rtuttl'"iction•
on ten~t.a
&i:lntenca acceHUp, a
eant&ucu accent and int.on.AL ioo
.zu·e a.aaigtusd the &Allie function
a)p, x. • Ul), a
Up, x + (ua\upecil.l.::d, but
1ndlcal.ed
f~aturea~o)
-----------------~-------~6tockwt1l 1
""l'he Jtole or Jut~'lu4t:iol\a
neconuideca.tiona ood Other
tlYll)
J)p, a, j ('th~ location ot tfie
center of the intonation contouc
coinc.itlae with primAryStlnteutia l sta:aaa. ~
•"J'he G"'nex-a.tiv~ ~troce~s of
lnt:ona.t1on 10 U9llt
lip, x, pauses ljuncturdaJ
Consld.:~;rattons'"
pitch, atrese, And junctures
Yo.r.lo
---------~
Cry• tal.·
~~~-i~~n~..
nnra
--D.ccent
···-----------------Up, •· ld, a.
l )u.nc:tui"ea)
p.Aue~"
-1f----------------------·------------Hult:r.dn
•Gtoarunatical lnto.-.ation 10
tHt4)
Ua.J 11l.)~, ln, ld
accant la only a termi.nological
va.ciant
I-'
_j:::"
15
As can be seen from this small, but
representative, sample of the literature on intonation,
many definitions conflict with others.
The definitions
of Prater (1957) and Haxtvigson (1969), for example, contrast markedly with that offered by Kingdon (1950).
Both
Prater and Hartvigson state that intonation is part of
stress; Kingdon states that stress is the base of intonation.
Kingdon's
emphas~s
on stress, that it is the basis
of intonation, conflicts with that of most linguists (except Prater and Hartvigson) since they insist on the
inclusion of pitch if nothing else.
Chomsky and Halle in- The- "Sbu·na- Fattern of English
(1968) omit any discussion of pitch on the grounds that
the authors had nothing new to add to the study of the
"phonetics of inton<;1tion."
Chomsky and Halle describe
stress apart from any consideration of pitch or of the
status of stress as a component of intonation.
Thus far it may appear that the choice between a
functional definition of intonation or a definition in
ter:ms of form can legitimately be made according to the
preference o_f a linguist or for the purpose of a particular study.
Too often investigators examine only one ele-
ment of intonation hoping to simplify their research.
Cohen and ' t Hart (1967) and Liberman and Sag (1974) state
that intonation is composed of many elements but only
examine pitch in their experiments.
Their procedure may
16
yield valuable information about pitch but ignores the
interaction of pitch with other components of intonation.
This study adopts a broad definition in terms of perceptual form.
The elements of intonation are pitch, stress,
loudness, juncture, and length.
There is growing support
for the grouping of these elements under the rubric of
intonation.
Experimental evidence has shown that there
is considerable interaction of these elementsi speakers
do not perceive them individually.
The investigations of
Denes and Milton-Williams (1962) show that the transmission and perception of the information associated with
intonation is carried on the acoustic level by a complex
pattern of fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration
cues.
Dwight Bolinger (1958) conducted tests with both
natural and artificial speech determining that the primary cue of stress in an utterance is pitch prominence.
Stockwell (1972) builds on this in his transformationalgenerative analysis of intonation.
In Stockwell's formu-
lation the center of the intonation contour coincides
with the primary sentential stress.
None suggests a
simple relation of pitch, stress, loudness, juncture, and
length.
The exact nature of the relation remains to be
dete,rmined.
Studying intonation as a unit composed of
many elements, as suggested here, rather than studying
its elements in isolation will facilitate further
investigations.
CHAPTER TWO
GRAMMAR-BASED APPROACHES
Investigations into the grammatical function of
intonation have dominated the field of study.
Grammar-
based approaches ignore the attitudinal functions of
intonation and instead investigate the relation of intonation contours to syntactic structures.
The structuralists
were the first to integrate a description of intonation
into a theory of grammar.
They attempted to correlate
intonation patterns with the sentence types with which
they occurred.
The transformational-generative approach
continues the established structural tradition.
Chomsky
and Halle (1968), for example, develop stress assignment
rules which apply to labelled bracketings.
Investigators
today are conducting empirical research into the perceptual reality of the descriptions of intonation patterns
grammarians have proposed.
The approaches and their con-
tributions to a linguistic theory of intonation are surveyed in the following chapter.
This study concentrates
on the assumptions which are basic to each approach rather
than the specific predictions and formulations made by
each.
17
18
THE STRUCTURAL APPROACH
The structural approach has
influenced almost all subsequent investigations of intonation.
The majority of the examples and problems pre-
sented in the literature on intonation originated as
structural descriptions.
Employing the discovery pro-
cedures that characterize the structural period, linguists
sorted out and classified the pitch levels, degrees of
stress, and juncture types of English.
Notational systems
were developed to facilitate the classification.
The most
well known are those of Pike (1945), and Trager and Smith
(1951).
Only recently have linguists begun to question
empirically the objective validity of the Trager-Smith
system.
In spite of Lieberman's experiements in 1965
which demonstrated that the Trager-Smith representations
were not syntactically independent, no one suggested a
major overhaul until Ladefoged and Vanderslice (19721.
Stockwell (1972) observes that the familiar four leveled
system of Trager and Smith has yet to be abandoned for
the Ladefoged and Vanderslice proposals.
The discoveries of the structuralists required a
new terminology.
Crystal (1969a) indicates that De Angulo
(19291 suggests the term prosody to include pitch, duration, and amplitude.
The term is first used in the struc-
tural literature by Bloch and Trager (1942).
mention of prosody in Bloorn£ield (1933):
stead uses the general term modification.
There is no
Bloomfield inTrager (1941)
19
proposes the term prosodeme.
Prosodeme is a technial
alternative for prosodic phoneme.
Prosodemes can be one
of two types; accents, prosodemes of syllables and words,
or intonations, prosodemes of phrases and sentences.
In
later work of Trager and Smith these were to be termed
super£ixes and intonations, respectively.
Hockett (1942)
makes a distinction between segmental and suprasegmental.
Segmentals are features which clearly follow each other in
the stream of speech; suprasegmentals are features which
extend over a series of several segmental groupings.
In
addition to providing terms to discuss intonation, the
structuralists, following Bloomfield 1 s example, developed
notation to describe its occurrences.
Bloomfield (1933) sets the direction for all
structural investigations of intonation.
He maintains a
distinction between pitch and stress; the phenomena were
to be dealt with separately.
Bloomfield is the first to
apply the techniques of segmental phonemic analysis to
intonation.
In the Bloomfieldian scheme, pitch phonemes
constitute morphemes and carry independent meanings.
Intonation contours must be morphemes since they carry
meaning and are composed of pitches; pitches are phonemes.
This formulation of the pitch levels as phonemes is found
also in later grarmnatical discussions of intonation.
In
addition to carrying meaning of their own, pitch phonemes
also play a role in forming syntactic constructions.
He
20
suggests three such constructions:
the statement, marked
by [·], the yes/no question, marked by (?], and the supplement question (now commonly the wh- question), marked
by [6].
Bloomfield's analysis had an important seminal
effect on the structuralists and on the transformationalists as well.
The major contributions of the structuralists,
however, can be found inthe work of Pike (1945) and
Trager and Smith (1951).
The phonemic aspects of Pike's
analysis are based on the premise that pitch contours are
independent morphemes, as suggested by Bloomfield.
Pike
describes intonation as consisting of four pitch levels
and two pauses.
The four pitch levels are relative to
the speaker and relative to each other as well.
The high-
est significant pitch is indicated by the number 1, the
lowest by the number 4.
Pike concludes that four levels
are sufficient to account for all the meaningful occurrences of pitch in English.
Of the two pauses, the ten-
tative pause 1/J sustains the height of the final pitch
contour~
and the final pause I//] lowers the height of the
final pitch contour.
When a pause occurs in the middle
of a sentence it separates large grammatical units, such
as clauses, from other units.
For Pike, the only phonemic
stress i:n English is the stress which differentiates members of minimal pairs such as ['permit, per'mit].
21
Building on Pike, Trager and Smith (1951) develop
a more complete analysis of intonation.
In An Outline of
English Structure the systems of pitch, stress, and juneture are described in detail.
Trager and Smith, like
Pike, have four levels of pitch; in contrast to Pike,
however, Trager and Smith, following Wells (1945), name
4 the highest pitch level and 1 the lowest.
As in all
structural investigations, the four pitch levels are
phonemic.
In addition they introduce pitch variation
features:
[ ·· J ,
a terminal sustaining pitch at the level
of the preceding contour;
I+], a terminal rise from the
level of the preceding contour:i.
and {-], a terminal fall
from the previous marked level.
Pike's two pauses are
expanded to become three types of terminal juncture.
[#]
is the symbol for terminal juncture, including by definitiona fall in pitch.
The terminal symbols I//], I/]
correspond to junctures with a rise in pitch and junctures
with sustained pitch, respectively.
In addition to the
four levels of pitch and three terminal junctures, Trager
and Smith propose and provide notations for four degrees
of phonemic stress:
/~/,
and weak ;v;.
primary;~;,
secondary /A/, tertiary
A change in pitch conditioned by
stress is considered allophonic.
A summary of how these
elements fit together is provided by Trager and Smith!
A final recapitualtion may now be made:
vowel, consonant, and stress phonemes all have
allophones statable in terms of position in the
22
sequence; plus juncture and pitch phonemes
have allophones statable in term of stress
sequences; terminal junctures have allophones
statable in terms of the pitch preceding them
(p. 52).
Trager and Smith also observe that certain
intonation patterns change the meaning of the segmentals
in the utterance.
Other linguists (Pike 1945 and Udall
1960, 1964) for example consider that a change in meaning,
signalled by intonation, indicates speaker attitude.
Trager and Smith do not include the affective function of
intonation in their analysis.
According to them, intona-
tion indicates differences in structural meanings.
{1) Are you reading Macaulay?
I£ the question asked is whether someone is reading a book
by Macaulay, the question becomes
2
.3
,..
Macaulay//.
If the question is addressed to Macaulay to inquire if he
is reading,
( .3)
(1} becomes
2...
Are
2
.
...
•
you ·read J.ng [ •• J
3
...
Macaulay//.
(p.
4 6)
The Trager and Smith system attributes the difference in
meaning of these sentences solely to the intonation patterns.
Transfortmational-generative grammar has made this
view obsolete.
It accounts for similar surface structures
(segmentally identical) with different meanings in terms
of distinct underlying phrase markers.
The deep struc-
tures have undergone transformations which produce similar surface structures.
The transformations change the
23
structural arrangement of the strings but preserve the
meaning.
Out of the structuralists' attempts to describe
intonation comes the practice of linking an intonation
with a sentence type.
This practice, which was begun by
Bloomfield when he outlined three sentence types and
three corresponding pitch contours, has been followed
for over three decades.
A recent example is the analysis
of sentence type on the basis of intonation by Stageberg
(197la}.
The 231+ contour characterizes statements, com-
mands, and wh- questionsi
233~
characterizes yes/no ques-
tions in the statement form, he's gone, yes/no questions
in the question form, are you there, and the initial
phrase or clause in an utterance.
Other relationships
between intonation and structure are also suggested.
How
Stageberg's sentence types were arrived at or how they
were empirically justified is unclear.
Fries (1964)
analyses a number of yes/no questions, categorized only
by syntactic form, to determine if sentences could be
related to a specific, corresponding intonation.
The
evidence seemed to contradict the structuralists' assumption.
Fries found that the intonation pattern occurring
with yes/no questions could also be found in other structuresi and, any pattern occurring with other structures
could also occur with the yes/no question.
Fries' con-
clusions suggest that the existence of a unique question
24
intonation is doubtful.
Nevertheless, current
grammatical investigations continue to rely on these
same descriptions.
THE TRANSFORMATIONAL-GENERATIVE APPROACH
Transformational-generative linguistics has its roots in
the structuralist tradition and one finds that the earliest treatments of intonation in a transformational framework also assumed a systematic relationship between the
structure of a sentence and its intonation.
This assump-
tion is basic to all generative studies of intonation.
The relationship of structure to intonation has become
the topic of many heated debates.
Whether intonation is
determined by deep structure, surface structure, or combinations thereof is of primary interest in most generative studies.
Stockwell (1960a), for example, is the first to
incorporate a description of intonation into a generative
grannnar of English.
Stockwell maintains that there is a
normal, or colorless, intonation.
Normal intonation is
the basic intonation to which all other intonations can
be compared.
"Normal intonation" was an often mentioned,
but vague concept in structural studies; Stockwell attempts to specify the notion of "normal intonation" in
transformational-generative terms.
Normal intonation is
the intonation pattern which accompanies the surface
25
structure o£ a non-derived, or kernel, sentence.
Stockwell takes the phrase structure rules and the transformations outlined in Chomsky (1957) and integrates them
with rules which assign intonation patterns.
The result
is Chomsky's terminal strings with specified intonation
patterns.
Stockwell proposes five rules to account for
normal intonation in English.
(1) S
-+
Nuc + IP
where Nuc (Nucleus) contains all the segmental elements
and IP
(Intonation Pattern) includes stress and pitch.
(2)
IP
-+
C + JP
The intonation pattern divides into the contour and the
juncture point.
The division is made since the contour
can be shi£ted by trans£ormations while the juncture point
is fixed.
(3)
c
-+
{disc}
{cont}
An intonation contour signals either continuity, in which
case the contour joins a segmental sequence to another
such sequence, or discontinuity, in which case the contour
separates a segmental sequence from others.
Rules (4)
and (5, Sal give possible descriptions of the discontinuous and continuous contours respectively.
uses the
~
in his notation as a variable, as
Stockwell
~
is used in
mathematics, to indicate an unspecified pitch phoneme.
26
(4) disc
-+
(S) cont
-+
001+
(Sa)
cont
-+
The difference between (S) and (Sa) allows for a phonemic
sustained juncture phoneme.
In (S) falling and rising
are the only two terminal junctures.
Fading juncture be-
comes sustained juncture in a predictable environment.
In case sustained juncture cannot be established as an
allophone of fading juncture Stockwell includes {OOOI}
in (Sa) which allows a phonemic sustained juncture.
(S)
and (Sa) include only intonations of non-derived sentences.
In Stockwellts system, transformations introduce
interrogative, list, emphatic, and contrastive intonations; these are excluded from (S) and (Sa).
In transformational-generative rule formulations,
the intonation pattern always appears in the final position of a structural description as indicated in rule (1).
Location of the contour juncture and primary stress in
the string is specified by morphophonemic rules.
The
proposed rules generate sentences with colorless, nonemphatic, noncontrastive intonation in which the primary
stress and the middle digit of the contour coincide on
the last item that is neither a pronoun nor a preposition.
27
Morphophonemic rules which distribute the components of a
contour apply from the beginning of a sequence (or last
JP) and as far as the next JP.
Segmental stress, primary
phrase stress and primary word stress, are determined
lexically.
Stockwell holds that intonation patterns have
intrinsic meaning.
This can be seen from his example
illustrated below.
(Stockwell's numbering is maintained
for convenience.)
(vi}
I a§l duwit tim~r6w+ I
231+
(vii}
I a~l d~wit tim~r~w+ I
241+
According to Stockwell, the phrase structure/intonation
rules can generate the 231+ and the 241+ contours which
occur with -r'll do it tomorrow.
Stockwell also states
that the contour 241+ is more emphatic than 231+.
There-
fore the emphasis is part of the meaning of the contour.
No transformation produced the emphatic 241+ contour.
Thus, Stockwell's
sys~em
is c_ontradictory.
The1 phrasie
structure/intonation rules and the emphatic transformation produce the 241+ contour.
By Stockwell's own defini-
tion a contour specified in a non-derived sentence is a
no·rmal intonation pattern.
According to this stystem the
241+ contour is both normal and emphatic.
Stockwell
(19721 later resolves this inconsistency by ceasing to
28
maintain that differences in meaning are carried by the
actual form of the intonation contour.
Stockwell (1960a) argues that the constituent
structure rules can generate a large number of intonation
patterns.
He reworks Chomsky's interrogative, nominaliza-
tion, and emphatic transformations to include intonation
assignments.
The transformations treat intonation pat-
terns as formative elements in a string like other formative elements.
The occurrence of a contour, Stockwell
maintains, can be specified by a simple phonological rule.
He suggests that intonation is so basic to language analysis that any transformation which fails to predict intonational breaks is ill-formed.
Accordingly, intonation
becomes one of the many criteria needed to develop the
simplest set of generative rules.
Chomsky and Halle {1968) do not attempt a
description of intonation in The Sound Pattern of English.
They do, however, include stress in their discussion.
According to Chomsky and Halle, the syntactic
component of a generative grammar generates a surface
structure which is interpreted by the phonological component.
The result of the interpretation is a pronuncia-
tion of the labelled bracketing.
In SPE the phonological
component assigns all aspects of pronunciation including
stress.
The major contribution of this work in respect
29
to prosody is the Nuclear Stress Rule (NSR).
This rule
specifies the normal stress pattern of the utterance.
The NSR assigns primary stress to the rightmost primary
stressed vowel in a major constituent {stress is treated
as a feature of vowels in SPE) .
Stress rules as well as
all other phonological rules apply according to the principle of the transformational cycle outlined in SPE:
{a) The rules of the phonological component
are linearly ordered in a sequence R 1
1
••• , R •
n
(b) Each rule applies to a maximal string
containing no internal brackets.
(c} After applying the rule R 1 we proceed
n
to the rule R •
1
(d) Unless an application of R intervenes,
n
the ruleR. cannot be applied after the
rule R.
.l.
J
(j< i) has applied .
(e) Rn is the rule:
(p.
erase innermost brackets
2 0) •
Lexical stress of an item is specified in the
lexicon·.
Only certain categories of lexical i terns 1 nouns,
verbs, and adjectives, are eligible to receive primary
stress within the constituent; or equivalently, certain
classes are restricted from receiving normal, primary
stress.
Lexical or word stress applies before any other
stress applications.
When the NSR assigns primary stress
to an item within a bracket, it simultaneously reduces
30
all previously assigned stresses by one.
Since the NSR
applies cyclically, this process is repeated continuously
until the surface structure has no remaining brackets.
The NSR does not add primary stress at the center
of the intonation contour as one might expect.
Instead,
the rule reduces the stress of other items in the same
bracketing; thus the stressed word receives primary stress
in the constituent because its stress was not eliminated
by• the rule.
If the
sentence is complex enough, that
is with numerous embeddings, the item which received primary stress in the innermost bracketing will surface with
no stress at all.
Two aspects of surface structure are
crucial to the assignment of stress by this rule:
cate-
gory membership and the constituent structure of the
utterance.
In addition to considering the category mem-
bership and the constituent structure, the NSR assumes
that the stress assigned to smaller units, as well as
individual words, is preserved in larger constructions.
The word stress specified in the lexicon is absolute.
This is also maintained by Trager and Smith (1951).
On the other side of the word stress issue are
Pike and Bolinger who maintain that the location of lexical stress varies according to the position of the intonation contour.
Accordingly, if a word is stressed, the
stress will be on a designated syllable.
In generative
terms, the stressed syllable of a lexical item is
31
indicated in the lexicon; the potential is realized if
stress rules assign stress to that word.
This suggests
that although potential word stress is indicated in the
lexicon, actual word stress assignment would take place
a£ter sentence stress assignment.
This is in direct con-
tradiction to the cyclic approach of the NSR.
Stockwell
(1960) makes a similar suggestion in stating that the
position of the contour determines what segmental formative receives phrase primary stress.
He also states that
some elements are eligible to receive stress while others
are not.
These elements would appropriately be marked in
the lexicon for this "potential," to apply Bolinger's
term to Stockwell'· s analysis.
Empirical testing, compar-
ing the intonation patterns of words and phrases in isolation and in utterances, will resolve the conflict.
Pre-
liminary investigations by Sledd (1962) suggest that the
stress potential approach taken by Bolinger and Pike is
correct.
Informants had difficulty in determining whether
the stress of Spanish student in
"r•m
going," said the Spanish student
were instances of sp&nish student or Spanish
st~dent.
This indicates that the citation forms of the phrases are
not distinctly maintained in the larger unit.
At the same time that Chomsky and Halle introduce
the NSR, which applies to surface structures alone,
32
Bierwisch (1968) argues that rules which assign prominence
to words and phrases must apply to more than the surface
structure.
Using examples from German, which he shows
can be extended to English, Bierwisch demonstrates that
assignment of prominence cannot depend on only the labelled bracketing and prior stress designations.
Accent
assignment rules may depend on early syntactic processes
as well as surface structure.
If this is so, the phono-
logical component can no longer be responsible for the
assignment of all suprasegmental patterns.
This suggests
that the theoretical boundary imagined to exist between
syntax and phonology is unnecessary and difficult to
maintain.
In a discussion intended to amend the NSR, Bresnan
(1971) arrives at a similar conclusion employing different
samples.
In order to account for apparent failure in many
instances of the NSR to predict occurrences of neutral
stress patterns correctly Bresnan suggests a reordering of
the application of the rule.
What in Chomsky and Halle
(19681 is a strictly phonological rule begins to function
with syntactic rules in Bresnan's formulation.
The se-
quential order of the items in the deep structure becomes
an essential consideration in the modified application of
the NSR; Bresnan orders the NSR after all the syntactic
transfonnations on each transformational cycle.
33
Bresnan argues that eliminating the restriction
that only surface
~tructure
determines stress assignment
will allow for more powerful and accurate rules.
Bierwisch (1968) independently reaches the same conclusion
without considering the NSR.
The reordering disturbs the
application of various syntactic transformations and still
does not account for some of the occurrences of stress
which the original application of the NSR fails to prediet, or predicts incorrectly.
The weakness may lie in
the NSR itself rather than with Bresnan•s reordering
hypothesis.
Since Bresnan adopts the NSR without rnodifi-
cation, one is unable to discern if it is the NSR,
Bresnan's hypothesis, or both that are faulty.
Stockwell
(1972) states that intuition suggests that Bresnan has to
be correct •.
Whatever the difficulties that she IBresnan]
still faces in making her proposal stick in detail (and the·re are several such, both ones that
she is aware of and ones that have been, or will
shortly be, pointed out to her by colleagues),
the basic insight is so appealing that like some
of Chomskyts first ideas about the role of transformations in grammar one feels it just· has to be
right (p. 931.
Lakeoff (19.72). objects to Bresnan •- s manipulation
of the NSR because of the syntactic complications introduced.
Rathe·r than allow the integration of phonological
and syntactic rules as suggested by Bresnan, or support
the cyclic application of the NSR as presented by Chomsky
and Halle, Lakoff represents the NSR as a global rule
34
whict applies in the phonological cycle to the surface
structure.
In criticizing Bresnan for her ordering
hypothesis, Lakoff presents a reformulation of the NSR
in terms of logical form:
In constituent A, put 1-stress [primary
stress] on constituent B if
(a} B is stressable; and either
(b) in logical structure B is a direct object,
and in shallow structure B has no c;I.ausemates following it, and in surface struc~
ture B is a clause-mates of its logical
predicate P: or
(cl there is no constituent to the right of
B bearing 1-stress (p. 298).
Lakoff argues that this proposal increases simplicity as
well as accuracy of the NSR.
In contrast to Bresnan's
formulations, no new rhythm or stress change rules need
to be posited.
The global constraint restricts applica-
tion to only one level, the phonologicali it allows no
presurface application of the rule.
Bennan and Szamosi (1972) also question Bresnan's
orde-ring of the NSR in the transformational cycle.
More
important, and long overdue, is their questioning of the
validity of the Nuclear Stress Rule itself.
They method-
ically demonstrate that if the NSR does apply, it can
apply only to surface structure and that incorporating
the NSR into the transformational cycle also makes incorrect predictions.
Instead of attempting to salvage the
NSR by further adjustments and reordering, Berman and
35
Szamosi survey the diverse and abundant exceptions to the
rule and consider that a rule of the NSR type is not sufficient to account for sentential stress in English.
The
examples presented in the discussion indicate that surface
structure alone cannot predict stress; the location of the
primary stress depends to some extent on semantics.
Iden-
tical constructions which can occur with either final or
non~final
sian.
normal stress lead the authors to this conclu-
Be·rrnan and Szamosi (1972) cite the following sen-
tences to support their claim .
.
(6}
(In 1556), what king(s) reigned?
(7}
(In 15561, what king(s) abdicated? {p. 313)
They obse·rve "it seems that the granunar has to be able to
assign both stress contours and to designate either one
as normal, in accordance with principles which are at
least in part semantic''
(p. 313).
The importance of
Berman and Szamosi's proposal lies in the suggestion that
different types of stress assigrunent rules may be necessary in order to account for stress accurately.
Bresnan (1972) defends the ordering hypothesis in
a rebuttal which addresses the objections of Lakoff, and
Berman and Szamosi.
Bresnan presents additional argu-
ments for the integration of syntactic and stress assignment rules.
Consideration of additional information
presented by Lakoff, Berman and Szamosi, and others,
36
suggests that while integrating stress and assignment
rules with syntactic transformations may be necessary,
the NSR itself needs to be reformulated or abandoned.
Stockwell (1972) provides a survey of the state
of the transformational-generative study of intonation.
Stockwell (1960) claims that a one-to-one relation exists
between the number of deep structures of a given surface
structure and the number of phonological surface phrases.
The revision of this claim states that there are several
correlations between deep structure and intonation.
The
correlation must be more complex than earlier suggested;
the assignment of intonation patterns does not reduce to
either a simple function of deep structure or of SU,rface
structure.
The assignment o£ intonation is not a purely
phonological process.
Stockwell abandons the suggestion
that an intonation contour can be chosen as one chooses
a lexical item.
This suggestion entails the assumption
that intonation contours have intrinsic meanings determined not by the location of the contour center, or the
presence rathe·r than absence of a contour, but rather the
shape of the contour itself.
Stockwell continues to maintain that there is a
normal, most basic intonation.
Also restated is the rela-
tion of intonation contours to transformations.
Trans-
formations assign intonation to derived sentences; neither
the deep structure nor the surface structure alone is
37
sufficient to specify the
utterance.
intonatio~
contour of a derived
Stockwell again insists that intonation should
not be restricted to the notion of stress.
A relocation
of the center of the intonation contour forms contrastive
stress.
The center of the intonation contour is the
point at which the pitch sharply changes.
Stockwell in-
sists that a correct theory of intonation will incorporate
the notion of a center to the intonation contour.
Since
this center of the intonation contour coincides with the
primary stress in the sentence, a theory of intonation
would also include stress rules.
Stockwell emphasizes
that although the location of the center of the contours
depends on prior stress assignment, other factors inde,..
pendently determine the shape of the contour.
A rule
similar to the NSR, or emphatic marking, or contrastive
stress, or topic/conrrnent marking may determine the center.
The shape of the contour may depend on speaker belief, a
factor very removed from surface structure of the utterance, or yes/no interrogative intonation, determined by
the derivation.
Only certain classes of lexical items,
nouns, verbs, and adjectives, are important when computing
the center of the contour in normal intonations.
All
grammatical classes which can enter into clitic relationship with nouns, verbs, and adjectives, that is articles
and some auxiliaries, medals, conjunctions, particles,
and adverbs, are obligatorily destressed.
38
Stockwell does not present
of the NSR.
ano~her
reformulation
Instead, he supports Bresnan's reordering
hypothesis in which the NSR applies in the syntactic
cycle.
In an earlier article (Stockwell 1960a} he argues
that the structural derivation of an utterance determines
its intonation.
Thus, the rules presented by Stockwell
(1960a) to specify intonation and Bresnan (1971, 1972)
to specify stress are compatible.
Stockwell is one of the few linguists who does
not follow Chomsky and Halle in separating pitch and
stress.
While it is true that dealing with stress first
and then pitch may be convenient
from the point of sim-
plicity, such a treatment may lead to cumbersome rules
awkwardly combined as well as to serious
oversights.
Developing intonation rules, which would minimally include rules of pitch and stress, may be a difficult task
at this stage in the study of intonation.
However, de-
veloping one set of rules before the other assumes that
one aspect of prosody is more basic than another.
Into-
nation rules are necessary to represent accurately the
psychological reality of the phenomena.
Stockwell points
the way for further investigation in his attempt to relate pitch and stress in a theory of intonation.
The t:ransformationalists appear to be
preoccupied with providing descriptions of intonations
not accounted for by the structuralists as well as
39
providing descriptions for those that were.
Not many
have stopped to question the standard examples upon which
new theories are being based.
Current investigations
assume the accuracy of the examples.
Vanderslice (1970)
helps to bring the problem into focus.
He challenges
the validity of the familiar compound noun phrase examples.
Many authors have maintained that the often cited
INPblackiNboard eraser]N]NPand ININPblack board]NP
eraser] N (p. 9) are distinct utterances.
Vande:rslice
argues that the believed distinction has no phonetic
reality.
And Lieberman (1965)_ has demonstrated, for
example, that linguists listen with a prejudiced ear and
not even uniformly.
An experiment was conducted in which
linguists experienced in using the Trager-Smith notation
for pitch and stress were asked to transcribe the same
utte-rances.
The transcriptions seriously disagreed.
Intonational features were forced into predetermined
categories as a result of the notational systems used.
The linguists transcribed pitch levels with a 50 percent
increase in accuracy when they heard no words.
In con-
trast, they could only distinguish two levels of stress,
stressed or unstressed, in the absence of lexical items.
This suppo·rts Lieberman's claim that the linguists'
knowledge of the wo-rds in the sentence and their knowledge
40
of the language influences their transcriptions.
Liebennan also found that some notational systems were
used more unifonnly and accurately than others.
One sys-
tem in particular, a tonetic system which makes no sharp
distinction between pitch and stress, used by Stockwell
in Lieberman's experiment was particuarly accurate and
consistent.
Liebennan attributes it to the fact that
fewer assumptions are imposed by the notation and that
allowances are made for the complex
relation of pitch
and stress.
Vanderslice and Ladefoged (19721 introduce a
distinctive feature representation of prosodic phenomena
to replace the traditional levels of pitch and stress.
The authors suggest that the system accounts for grammarprosodic relations in an
(p. 837L
1'
intuitively satisfying way"
Intuition, however, cannot replace verification ..
Investigators should attempt to verify empirically the
accuracy of this system as well.
This is not to suggest that all the data presented
in the structural discussions is incorrecti rather, that
researchers should ve·rify it before accounting for it ..
This would necessarily entail examining the accuracy of
the notational systems as well.
The generative grammar-
ians, on the other hand, must abandon their "superficial
examination 11 of prosodic features and take a close look
41
at prosodic form and function in language (Chomsky &
Halle, 1968, p. 15).
It is imperative that linguists
consider the empirical evidence, admittedly sometimes
conflicting.
Traditionally, transforrnationalists have
used introspection, sanctioned by the notion of native
speaker intuition, to support their claimsi fieldwork
does not characterize the generative era.
Transforrna-
tionalists can no longer ignore the empirical evidences
it is frequently at odds with assumed realities.
A theory
of intonation must be- based on an intensive study of data •
•
CHAPTER THREE
GRAMMAR-INDEPENDENT APPROACHES
Grammar-independent approaches represent an
attempt to account for aspects of intonation which the
structuralists or the transformational-generative grammarians did not sufficiently develop.
The early struc-
tural investigators ignore attitudinal considerations and
viewed intonation as having meaning which modified the
segmental stringi they did not even consider attitudinal
contours.
Inquiries into the affective character of
intonation developed outside of a grammatical framework.
Because of the grammarians' failure to discover systematic relations between either lexical categories or
syntactic structures and intonation contours, some linguists began looking at intonation from a pragmatic or
information theory approach.
Drawing on the concepts of
communicative value and presupposition linguists have
attempted to elucidate the relation between the segmental
string and its prosodic features.
THE ATTITUDINAL APPROACH
The research includes those
studies which consider only the grammatical function of
intonation and those studies which deal with only the attitudinal function of intonation.
42
It has been debated
43
p
whether this inquiry is legitimately in the domain of
linguistic concerns.
Paralinguistic features, as well
as prosodic features, indicate attitude.
Crystal (1969a)
states "From the point of view of the primary semantic
role of prosodic and paralinguistic features--the signalling of attitude--there seems to be little difference •
• . . " (p. 128).
According to Crystal, paralinguistic
features are phonetically less discrete than prosodic
features and allow more idiosyncratic variation.
The
prosodic features of pitch, loudness, and duration a·re
always present in an utterance; a speaker can add paralinguistic features without disturbing the normal flow
o:f the sentences.
In Crystalts formulation prosodic sys-
tems include pitch direction (tone}, pitch-change, pause,
loudness, tempo, and rhythmicality.
Crystal includes
tension in both the prosodic and paralinguistic category.
In addition to tension, voice qualifiers and voice qualifications comp-rise paralinguistic features.
Crystal
rates voice qualifiers such as whisper, breathy, husky,
creak, falsetto, and resonant as "more linguistic" than
voice qualifications such as laugh, giggle, tremulousness,
sob, and cry, which he rates as least linguistic of all
the paralinguistic features.
This discussion considers
only the prosodic, that is, linguistic systems.
'
44
Studies of the attitudinal function of intonation
most clearly address the assumptions made by the native
speaker about intonation.
The native speaker-hearer has
an awareness of this feature of language and is adept at
manipulating it.
It cannot be denied that the native
speaker-hearer can make conscious and correct observations about intonation in natural, unplanned conversation.
Imagine, for example, the following exchanges.
A:
B:
A:
How much was your income tax this year?
One thousand dollars.
That's high.
(2) A:
B:
A:
How much was your income tax this year?
One thousand dollars.
Well, don't talk to me like that, I'm
not the income tax collector!
(1)
or
The main difference between the two conversations is the
intonation.
Attitudinal studies attempt to describe how
the difference in intonation relates to the different
meanings of utterances.
Pike, Uldall, and Schubiger are
among those linguists who support including attitudinal
investigations within the rubric of linguistics.
They
have conducted linguistic inquiries into the affective
function within their studies of intonation.
Pike, Uldall,
and Schubiger consider the valuable information on the
insights of the native speaker-hearer into the use and
effects of intonation.
Pike (19451 is one of the few linguists who views
the attitudinal aspect to be the only valid function of
45
intonation.
Pike states that there is no grammatical
basis for intonation; intonation on speaker attitude at
the time of the utterance rather than its grammatical
sentence type.
His investigations of auditory phonetics
and his notational devices were and are more popular than
his conceptual orientation.
Pike proposes that there are
colorless, or meaningless, intonation contours; they give
no indication of speaker attitude.
Every sentence in a
language is spoken with pitch and stress.
These intona-
tions which serve the mechanical function of forming a
sentence make up the intonational minimum of speechi they
contribute nothing to the meaning of the utterance.
These
intonation patterns, that are called colorless by Pike,
are precisely those that other linguists have been and
are investigating for grammatical intonation.
In addition to these contours, according to Pike,
there exist contours which are explicit in meaning.
have lexical meanings.
stress add meaning to
words themselves.
Words
Certain arrangements of pitch and
the utterance not found in the
Intonation modifies meaning according
to the attitude of the speaker.
Such intonations depend
on the context of delivery says Pike.
He uses the fol-
lowing anecdote to illustrate this point.
Paul was studying intonation, and noting any
new contours which he heard at odd moments.
One afternoon he said, very impatiently, John,
te1·1 Mary ·that she has forgotten to go to""""'the"
46
store; she will have to hurry to get there
before it closes. Paul noticed in his own
speech something which he had not recorded
previously; so he repeated the sentence for
analysis.
In turning to research, however,
his impatience disappeared and he became introspective.
In abandoning his impatience, he
automatically dropped his impatient intonation
contours, and, in becoming introspective, automatically substituted introspective intonation
contours with slow forms, deliberate utterance,
and resultant additional pauses and glides.
Upon noticing these changes, Paul attempted to
utter the sentence as he had done originally,
and felt foolish since the simulated emotion
of the intonation contours was not paralleled
by actual emotion. Persisting in repetition,
Paul suddenly could not be sure that he was
repeating accurately, since the sentence novl
appeared somewhat queer and somewhat plausible
simultaneously (p. 12) •
The attitudinal intonation of an utte·rance,
although potentially alterable, is semantically powerful.
Recall Pike •· s example given on page 5
above.
The understanding of the utterance
Is breakfast ready yet?
varies radically according to its intonation.
Normally,
the intonation and the words chosen by the speaker convey
the same message; words and intonation work together.
But
the intonation often conveys a meaning different from the
lexical message.
A speaker can deliver insulting lines
with a smile and convey a compliment; praises delivered
with contempt are insults; forceful or excited statements
delivered with matter-of-fact intonation are ironic.
These
exfu~ples
suggest that where a lexical-intonational
47
conflict occurs the intonational meaning overrides that
present in the segmental features alone.
Although two classes of intonational functions
are present in his examples, Pike only acknowledges one.
One is identified as the class of intonations indicating
speaker attitude.
Intonations which convey irony, in-
sults, impatience, praise, disgust, or any other speaker
attitudes are correctly members of this class.
Pike con-
siders question and exclamation intonation also to indicate speaker attitude.
Many other linguists would group
questions and exclamations in the second class, the class
of g-rammatical functions.
Because Pike does not recognize
a grarmnatical basis for intonation, he must include these
occurrences with considerations of attitudinal intonation.
Pike cites the following sentences as exhibiting speaker
attitude through intonation.
(3) horse?
(4) horse!
He suggests that the meaning of the contour changes the
meaning of the utterance.
The sentences appear to have
the same surface st-ructure.
a·re indeed unique sentences.
Although only one word, they
They are not, as Pike states,
the same wo-rd whose meaning is modified by intonation.
Acco-rding to a t-ransfo.nnational gene-rative approach sentences (3} and (4) have different deep structures.
48
(5) Is that a horse?
(3) horse?
(6) Look at that horse!
(4) horse!
(5) and (6) are possible full utterances for the reduced
forms in (3) and (4).
All but the focus of the sentence,
horse, has been deleted.
The intonations correspond to
the underlying structures in this case, they do not add
meaning to the word horse.
Unlike Pike, but like many other linguists,
Kurath (1967) views the function of intonation in English
as both grammatical and referential.
Reference to the
speakers' feelings includes the speakers' attitude toward
the content of the message, the audience, and to the effects he intends to produce on the person or persons
addressed.
Kurath suggests that once linguists explore
the g-ranunatical functions they can examine attitudinal
function of intonation.
Although this proposal suggests
the primacy of one function over another, it would prevent horse (!) (?)
in Pike's analysis from being a
problem.
Uldall (1960) investigates whether intonation
contours have explicit meaning, independent of words, and
whether this meaning is imposed over the words to enhance
or change their semantic value.
This approach assumes
two systems are at work which come into contact with
eve,ry utterance.
If, according to Uldall, the first
49
assumption is true, and intonation contours have explicit
meanings, then speakers should be able to identify the
meaning of the intonation contours of a sentence with
which it occurs.
Uldall designed an experiment to test
speakers' perception of intonational meaning.
She pre-
sented four sentences with artificially produced pitch
contours, intended to be as neutral as possible, a statement, yes/no question, wh- question, and a command to
speakers.
She then asked the listeners to rate the con-
tours according to pai·rs:
bored/interested, polite/rude,
timid/confident, sincere/insincere, tense/relaxed, disapproving/approving, deferential/arrogant, impatient/
patient, emphatic/unemphatic, agreeable/disagreeable.
Speakers could most readily identify the contrasts of
pleasant/unpleasant and interest/lack of interest.
Although Uldall labels the contours under
investigation intonation contours, they are only pitch
contours.
She used synthesized contours precisely to
exclude stress, length, or juncture information present
in natural language.
Uldall's study consequently exam-
ines only one feature of intonation.
contributed to the fact that
This may well have
speakers were unable to
make consistent pattern-meaning identifications.
Uldall
finds that the emotion listeners associate with a particular intonation contour often closely relates to the
50
actual lexical entries in the utterance.
As a result of
a later experiment Uldall (1964) concludes that the less
interesting an intonation contour is, the more influential the sentence itself is in judging the total effect
or attitude of the utterance.
The converse is also true.
The meaning of an interesting contour dominates the meaning of the lexical items.
This relation naturally raises the question of
what interesting means, a word not clearly defined by the
author.
Interesting could mean informative, or it could
indicate that the lexical items and the intonation patterns have conflicting meaning.
Both are interpretations
consistent with Pike's suggestion that attitudinal meaning colors the interpretation of the lexical items.
When
an intonation contour carries no information a grammatical or mechanical function is indicatedi the words carry
all the meaning.
A meaningful, informative intonation
enhances or alters the lexical meaning; the focus is on
the meaning of intonation.
How could sentences be more
or less interesting, or informative?
easy.
More interesting is
The sentence carries the information and the ac-
companying intonation necessarily agrees.
ing is more difficult.
Less interest-
Perhaps a single word sentence
such as Okay or Oh with one of a number of informative
intonations could be considered less interesting, that is
less informative.
If, on the other hand, interesting
51
signals conflict, then when intonation and the sentence
carry the same attitude, or none, the words carry the
message.
If the messages of the sentence and the intona-
tion are in conflict the intonation carries the weight of
the interpretation.
Uldall's (1960) informants reported having
difficulty with the experiment since commands were more
limited in the social contexts they could be put into
than the other sentence types.
Similarly, Schubiger
(1958) implies that not all sentence types can occur with
all contours.
Intending to develop a manual for non-
native speakers as well as a reference for linguists,
Schubiger orders the material according to sentence types:
statements, commands, yes/no questions, wh- questions,
enumerations, tag questions, and exclamations.
tion divides into "normal intonations"
Each sec-
(Pike's colorless)
and patterns with a specific connotation.
Schubiger sug-
gests twelve special connotations for statements, six for
commands, and seven for both wh- and yes/no questions.
Commands, then, have fewer intonations with which they
can occur.
Such pragmatic considerations as the possible
occurrence of; commands in particular contexts may prove
useful in attempting to discover attitudinal intonation/
message correlations.
52
THE INFOID1ATION APPROACH
Spanning three decades and
independent of prevailing grammatical theories, information oriented investigations have grown out of the need
to predict occurrences of phenomena not accounted for by
structural and transfo+.mational-generative treatments of
English prosody.
The studies deny the structural deter-
mination of intonation and in so doing challenge the basic
assumptions of the grammatical approaches.
Hul tzen (1959}
gave the information approach its name, drawing information from the mathematical communiction theory of Shannon
and Weaver.
The basic assumption of this approach is that
there is a systematic relation between the intonation of
an utterance and the information conveyed.
According to
Hultzen, a "trick" in the tune of an utterance indicates
an information point.
variety of terms:
The trick has been identified by a
to Bolinger it is accent, to Schmerling,
Chomsky and Halle, Lakoff, and others, sentential stress,
to Stockwell, center of the intonation contour.
The
occurrence of an unpredictable item signals an information
point.
tion.
If only one word can occur, there is no informaIf the probability that a choice will occur is high,
there is little information.
The greater the number of
equiprobable choices, the higher the information content
of the entry chosen.
Bolinger introduces the term
relative semantic weight to
dis~cuss
the amount of
53
information conveyed by a lexical item:
the less
probable the choice, the greater the relative semantic
weight.
According to this approach, the information
points determine the location of sentential stress on
the stress-pitch correspondence; grammatical-intonational
correlations are merely coincidental.
Information ori-
ented discussions often demonstrate that limited examples
form the basis of the persuasive arguments of grammatical
theories.
Bolinger is the chie£ advocate of the information
approach to intonation analysis.
His most recent article
on the subject "Accent is Predictable (if you're a mind
readerl,"
(1972al answers the recent transfonnational-
generative attempts to describe one aspect of the English
prosodic system.
In grammatical formulations, stress
assigrnnent by syntactic rules is dependent on category
membership.
Verbs, nouns, and adjectives
are eligible
to receive normal primary stress according to their position in the hierarchical derivation of the sentence.
Bolinger demonstrates that category membership cannot be
a sufficient criteria for stressability.
Members of any
one given category are not uniformly stressed.
(1) I have a p6int to make.
(21 I have a point to emphasize.
(p. 6331
54
The NSR co·rrectly predicts the elimination of the acce·nt
(or sentence stress) on the sentence final verb in (1);
the prediction is the same for (2}, but this time it is
incorrect.
Sentences (1) and (2) are identical in syn-
tactic form; the NSR cannot correctly predict both occurrences of accent.
Make and emphasize are both verbs; but
emphasize contains more information than make.
The NSR
cannot account £or the choice of the semantically richer
verb as part of the decision to convey information.
A
syntactic rule such as the NSR cannot account for infonnation which belings to semantics.
Bolinger suggests that
considering the most mundane occurrences of structureintonation pairs has misled linguists to believe that the
syntactic-prosodic relation is valid.
such as cl6thes to wear, £6od to eat,
as the culprits.
He names examples
l~ssons
to learn,
In f6od to eat, food contains the in-
formation; to eat contains nothing new since food is to
eat.
Similarly, lessons are to learn; clothes are to
wear.
result.
If less predictable verbs occur, different contours
Although the structure of the clause remains the
same, as in
mess~ges
to mem6rize, the less predictable,
more informative, verb is accented.
The above example shows that the syntactically
motivated NSR does not make the correct predictions.
contours of certain structures, with varying lexical
The
55
items, cannot be predicted with any regularity.
Accented
and unaccented members of stress eligible categories are
found in identical structures.
According to most authors,
the syntactic-morphological class of an item determines
its stressability.
Pronouns, for example, belong to a
syntactic category restricted from receiving primary
stress.
Bolinger, .however, defines the non-stressable
category is terms of semantics:
"pronouns are formal
deictic elements that are semantically empty 11
(p. 636).
Because o£ this formulation, Bolinger criticizes Bresnan's
stress analysis.
In order to account for stress assign-
ment in sentences similar to (3)-(6}, she suggests a
semi-pronoun category.
(3) Those are crawling things.
(4) Those are crawling insects.
(5) r•ve got to go see a guy.
'
(6} I''ve got to go see
a friend.
(p. 636)
Bresnan includes lexical entries such as guy, things,
people which do not receive stress where predicted by the
NSR in a semi-pronoun category.
Bolinger notes that the
obvious problem is that there are no syntactic grounds
for this category.
These words exhibit none of the
morphological or syntactic properties of pronouns.
Less
obvious is the £act that while pronoun accent, or lack o£
it, is predictable, lack of accent in semi-pronouns is
56
"only highly probable"
(p. 637).
Bolinger concludes that
the semi-pronoun category is unnecessary.
The semantic
theory would allow for contextual assignment of stress.
Things, for example is unstressed in (3) and stressed in
(7) as determined by the relative semantic weight of its
occurrence.
Bolinger illustrates this point by citing
the following sentence.
(7) I'm mainly concerned to keep Bermuda
grass cut back from beds where I have
other thfngs planted (p. 637).
He states that planting is presupposed because the
speakers are discussing a gardeni things, being the unpredictable item, is accented.
Planted carries less informa-
tion than things in the utterance.
He also considers a
situation in which the action of the utterance is presupposed.
If two shoppers are talking, they take buying for
granted in things to buy.
Buy makes less a contribution
than things, or alternatively, when thing is mentioned,
buying is quite predictable.
Bolinger systematically accounts for instances of
accent by employing the concept of relative semantic
weight which grammatical rules do not explain.
Bolinger's
analysis of intonation in terms of information makes correct predictions where the NSR fails.
The information
approach considers context, semantic weight, and presupposition, factors which, until recently, linguistic analysis failed to consider.
In the past, most linguists
57
were unwilling to integrate information and grammar based
approaches; to do so would require expanding current
linguistic models.
THE PRAGMATIC APPROACH
The philosophic tradition of
Searle, Grice, and Austin has had an influence on recent
linguistic investigations.
Pragmatics express the rela-
tionship of the sign, in this case language, to the user
and the real world.
The study of intonation is just
beginning to feel the influence of general pragmatic
investigations.
A very few linguists with this orienta-
tion (Schmerling, Sag, and Liberman) are currently examining prosody of the English.
For convenience this study
will refer to the approach presented in the work of
Schmerling, and Liberman and Sag as the pragmatic approach
to intonation.
Basic to the pragmatic approach to intonation is
the assumption that the analysis of the syntactic structure of a sentence is not sufficient to determine its
prosodic contours.
The pragmatic approach considers real
world (pragmatic} factors such as presupposition, speaker
intent, and the illocutionary force of the utterance.
In
pragmatic analysis the unit of investigation is the speech
act.
The speech act includes not only the utterance (the
segmental string plus its phonological manifestation,
including intonation) but its context as well.
58
Like Chomsky and Halle, Bresnan, and Lakoff,
Schmerling (1971) examines the prosodic feature of
stress.
Employing the notion of presupposition, she
demonstrates that category membership does not govern
stressability.
In so doing she challenges one of the
basic assumptions of the generative approach.
Schmerling
argues that by employing the notion of presupposition one
can more accurately predict which items receive stress.
Examine the principle of stress assignment as first
formulated by Schmerling.
1.
2.
Portions of sentences containing
presupposed material have reduced
stress.
The remaining--asserted--portions
of these sentences have heavy
stress.
(p. 247)
This rule applies to whole constituents of sentences as
well as to individual words.
Schmerling cites the fol-
lowing example in which the verb phrase of the right
hand sentence is unstressed.
(1) Harry smokes a great deal, and Pete
also takes unnecessary risks with
his health (p~ 252).
The verb phrase of the subordinated sentence is unstressed because it is presupposed that to smoke a great
deal is to take an unnecessary risk with one's health.
Schmerling (1976} explains that sentences with
identical surface structures have different stress patterns using the example below.
59
{2) This is the doctor I was telling you about.
(3) This is the doctor I was telling you about.
(p.
67)
Sentence (2) may be uttered in a hospital or other
environment where one would expect to find a doctor.
In
(3) doctor is stressed because the presence of a doctor
is more remarkable.
Schrnerling {1976) also criticizes Bolinger's
information approach.
She cites the following example
to illustrate the limits of that approach.
The context is this: suppose I operate a
small shrimp-processing plant.
Shrimp are the
only things which are processed at this plant,
but, of course, the processing involves doing
several different things to the shrimp. Now
suppose that some afternoon I am busy working
and a friend drops by and invites me to go out
for a beer.
I reply:
clean
sort
I can't--I've got all these
peel
shrimp to
devein
package
etc.
{p. 42)
The information approach, Schmerling argues,
would predict stress on the verb.
Given the context,
shrimp conveys less information than any other entry.
Since the verb is the most informative, least predictable,
it should be accented.
Yet primary stress on the verb
would sound quite odd.
While she has found an inconsis-
tency in the information approach, Schmerling fails to
recognize the similarities between the pragmatic and
60
in.for.mation approaches.
She never returns to show how
the pragmatic account would vary.
And indeed the prag-
matic account makes the same incorrect prediction.
Consider Schmerling's refinement of her original
stress principle:
Those portions of sentences receive reduced
stress which contain material presupposed
by the speaker to be true and known to the
addressee (sJ.
(1971, p. 249)
I£, for example, Becky knows Linda owns and operates a
shrimp factory, this in.formation is presupposed.
Accord-
ing to Schmerling's stress principal shrimp should receive
reduced stress because it is material presupposed by the
speaker to be true and to be known by the addressee.
Given the knowledge o£ Linda 1 s occupation, the presupposition is that Linda will do something with the shrimp.
The assertion is that Linda will clean, devein, sort,
peel, or package, the shrimp, but none of these words
receives the stress.
The prediction of where the stress
will £all is the same in the information and pragmatic
theories.
One would be hard pressed to find a context in
which their predictive power is di.fferent.
The claim
that those items which have relatively more weight are
stressed, from the information approach, and the claim
that the asserted, not presupposed, sections of a sentence receive heavy stress are suspiciously similar.
two approaches appear to be terminological variants.
The
61
Furthermore, what Schmerling seems to be ignoring
entirely is that Bolinger himself makes extensive use
of the notion of presupposition.
It is clear that Bolinger (1972a) has taken
presupposition into account in his analysis of the
following sentence.
(4) The volcano that erupted has been a
threat for centuries (p. 641).
According to Bolinger, if this were uttered as a response
to Tell me about the volcano that erupted then the noun,
volcano, being presupposed, would be less accented.
Erupted would also receive the stress under
analysis.
Sch~erling's
On the contrary, if this utterance were an
answer to I want to know more about the geography of the
region the opposite occurs:
volcano receives stress
since the speaker asserts the whole subject.
For Bolinger
the notion of presupposition is an integral part of a
total information systemi for Schmerling it is the total
system.
Bolinger views presupposition as part of a
semantic theoryi Schmerling as an element of prggmatic
jurisdiction.
Assigning presupposition to two different
components makes the complementary nature of the two
approaches.
Although the information approach and the
pragmatic approach overlap for the most part, Schmerling
makes a valuable contribution to intonation theory in her
62
analysis of normal stress.
Schmerling (1974, 1976)
breaks with the long established tradition of assuming
normal stress exists and claims that the notion is more
restrictive than helpful in the study of stress:
there is no difference in principle between
the assignment of stress in sentences like
(3) [The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy
dog.]--with no special presuppositions--and
assignment of what has traditionally been
referred to as contrastive stress: in the
former case the whole sentence is asserted,
in the latter only the "contrastively
stressed" portion (1971, p. 248).
Schmerling
thus maintains that only one type of rule is
necessary to predict all occurrences of stress in English,
a formulation which eliminates the notion of normal stress
as opposed to contrastive or emphatic stress.
In using
the term "special presupposition" Schmerling appears to
be trading the notion of normal stress for the notion of
normal presupposition.
ment.
This substitution is no improve-
No one presupposition is more basic, or "normal,"
than another.
The notion of normal intonation can be
abolished without substituting other, equivalent notions;
the final chapter discusses this more fully.
Liberman and Sag {1974) are interested in
intonational form and discourse function in general.
They specifically examine the intonation of questions
from a pragmatic point of vie-vi.
They substitute the term
discourse· ·function for the more common term illocutionary
63
force.
As the term discourse function indicates, their
study relates the intonation of the utterance to its role
in conversation.
An utterance may serve as a question,
a command, a request, or a rebuke.
The authors also em-
ploy the notion of speech act where the notion of illocutionary force is often an accompanying concept.
The con-
cept of illocutionary force enables pne to make an
explicit statement of the relation of speaker intention
and listener reaction to the utterance.
Consider the ut-
terance I will shoot you.
Austin's (1962) formulation of the illocutionary
force of the utterance yields in saying I would shoot him
I was threatenting him (p. 122).
The force o£ the utter-
ance is the "threatening" of the listener.
a threat.
The result is
Illocutionary force subsumes the notion o£ dis-
course function.
Sag and Liberman (1975) also examine intonation
and indirect speech acts.
An indirect speech act is an
utterance with an illocutionary force not suggested by
its lexical items or by its structure.
(1) Can you pass the salt?
This utterance is literally an inquiry into a person's
physical capabilities; it has the surface structure of a
question.
And yet, all native speakers of English would
realize that uttered at the dinner table (1) cannot be
64
considered a question about the listener 1 s ability.
Although (1) has the syntactic form of a yes/no question,
it has the illocutionary force of a request.
One would
expect no other answer than to receive the salt.
(2) Is it raining out?
In contrast,
(2) has the surface form of a yes/no question
as well as the illocutionary force of a question; in this
case information is being solicited.
speech act;
(2) is a direct
(1) is indirect.
According to the Liberman-Sag study, of the many
utterances with the syntactic form of a question only
some are used as questions in discourse; that is in only
some utterances does the syntactic form of a question
correspond directly to the discourse function.
The au-
thors use the term real questions to distinguish utterances which have the discourse function from those that
have only the syntactic form of questions.
Sag and
Liberman suggest that real questions have an intonation
pattern which requires that they be understood and be
responded to literally, as questions; whereas the indirect
speech acts are not characterized by the same intonation.
They isolate a potential question intonation for whquestions.
Liberman and Sag found that the
occurs exclusively in real questions.
11
tilde 11 contour
The authors chose
65
the name tilde for the shape of the frequency/time graph
of the contour.
The tilde is unacceptable in {5), a
question, but ungrammatical in (6), a suggestion.
(5) A woman asks her neighbor why she
doesn't move west:
Why don't you move to California?
(6) Hey Baldwin, the climate here is really
bad for you! I've got a suggestion--
*
Why don't you move to California?
488)
(p.
Sag and Liberman provide an acoustic description
of the tilde contour:
The TILDE contour has the following
tonological characteristics:
1. High pitch on the wh- word (and
associated elements). The-utterance may
begin on a mid pitch and rise to this high,
or it may begin high.
2. A fall to low pitch on the next major
stress of the utterance.
3. A rise in pitch on the last syllable
of the utterance.
(p. 488)
As a corollary to the suggestion that questions have a
unique intonation pattern, Liberman and Sag hypothesize
that no particular intonation can force an indirect
interpretation of a speech act:
11
some intonation con-
tours can 'freeze • an utterance pragmatically, i.e.
require a literal interpretation, but no intonation contour can force an indirect interpretation ..
(p. 196).
In spite of the useful observations made in the
Liberman-Sag
study ·the authors make questionable
66
assumptions.
The first is to assume that one syntactic
form is better suited for a certain discourse function
than another:
"they [sentences] aren't always used to
perform the speech acts which the form makes them best
suited for"
(p. 487).
One cannot predict the illocution-
ary force of an utterance from its surface structure and
there is no reason to expect her/him to be able to.
This
has been widely discussed and established in the speech
act and pragmatic linguistic literature.
Liberman and
Sag seem to ignore this opaque relation of structure to
force.
As a result of the first assumption Liberman
and Sag find it necessary to disambiguate speech acts.
Speech acts are not ambiguous; the notion of speech act
includes speaker intent, speaker-listener's shared presuppositions, and the context.
Only the orthographic
representation of the utterance, the written sentence,
is ambiguous.
These faulty assumptions do not diminish
the validity of the Liberman-Sag studyi they do indicate
that such considerations are not necessary in an analysis
of intonation based on speech acts although they would be
necessary in a discussion of written sentences.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE ESL APPROACH
With intonation, as with most academic fields
there is a disparity between theoretical or empirical
research and the practical applications of its results.
The recent work of linguists is not reflected in the
teaching materials available to the instructor of English
as a second language for use in the classroom.
It is not
the case that pertinent discoveries wait for teachers to
transform them into helpful instructional tools.
The
results of current investigations into intonation are
often inapplicable to language instruction.
Some of the latest research is not only
inapplicable but discredits existing descriptions without
replacing them.
Linguists have seriously questioned the
concept of normal intonation.
Linguists have not been
able to capture normal intonation by definition or description.
Schmerling (1971) argues that the concept of
nonnal should be eliminated from the vocabulary of stress
analysis; Bolinger's (1972) proposals suggest its inadequacy for intonation description.
In spite of the fact
that the concept is questionable, normal intonation is
alive and well, and living happily on ·the pages of the
pronunciation manuals.
67
68
One task of the ESL instructor is to help students
use pitch and stress appropriately.
Teaching pronuncia-
tion includes teaching pronunciation; the instructor must
assume that certain intonation contours are "normal" for
a given utterance.
However, the texts rarely discuss ex-
actly what the norm is.
The definition of normal intona-
tion offered by Kingdon is consistent with the use of the
term and treatments of intonation in ESL texts.
Nonnal intonation is taken to be the type of
intonation used by the generality of good
speakers of English.
It is characterized by
a normal degree of emphasis on those words
which by their natu±e or function demand it,
by the absence of.any special emphasis, and
by the use in each utterance of a tune appropriate to its simplist or most straightforward, or most usual meaning.
In some cases
it is not possible to decide which of two or
more tunes is natural to an utterance without
knowing the context and the situation in which
it is used (p. 142}.
The definition is opaque:
normal intonation is the
intonation used by native speakers in spontaneous speech.
And that still awaits description.
Linguistic theory,
as well as English teaching, needs a clear cut description
and definition of the workings of intonation.
Because of
this lack of definition, ESL pronunciation manuals often
present examples of sentences with corresponding intonation patterns without giving student or teacher a clue as
to the motivation for the particular combinations.
Another assumption basic to the presentation of
intonation in ESL texts is that there is a direct and
69
consis~ent
correspondence between the grammatical
structures and intonational patterns.
This assmnption
derives from structural linguistic theories of intonation
which, according to Collier {197f); "are frequently of a
highly impressionistic nature" (p. 23).
No pronunciation
text that deals with intonation escapes being organized
by sentence types.
The categories of sentence types in-
clude statements, commands, questions, appositions, and
direct address, as well as a variety of others.
Instruc-
tors take many alleged correlations between syntax and
intonation which linguists are now, or have yet to investigate, and teach them as facts.
Much current research
has caused serious doubt to fall on the structuralintonational correlations as presented in both ESL and
structural linguistic texts.
The affective component of intonation is very
real to speakers of the language.
Intonation continues
to influence the speaker and listener without definition
or accuarate description by linguists.
Intonation as an
attitude carrier is so well recognized by speakers and
its use so varied, that it is difficult to investigate.
The terms used even in linguistics inquiries are extremely
flexible.
Comforting, sarcastic, loving, bored, polite,
sincere, confident, approving, tense are all examples of
the impressionistic labels authors use to discuss
attitudinal intonation.
70.
Schubiger (1958} attempts to
comb~ne
a
description of attitudinal intonation with a description
of the intonation of various structures.
She divides the
sentences by type and gives from one to six basic patterns
for each type.
A section on "special connotations" fol-
lows each typei in these sections Schubiger attempts to
give the non-native speaker examples of emotions and contexts causing variations in the basic pattern(s).
For
questions, for example, Schubiger presents a basic yes/no
question intonation then provides contexts and a description for curt, obliging, attention drawing, interested,
surprised, concerned, despairing and impatient intonation
patterns.
Other texts attempt to treat attitudinal into-
nation but none as systematically as Schubiger.
However,
Schubiger could neve:r exhaustively present all the possible variations, in addition, there are no rules for the
students to follow.
Learning intonation from examples is
the best means available.
An illustration of the theory/practice conflict
is found in the proposals made by Stageberg (197lb) for
ESL instruction.
Stageberg suggests that once the stu-
dents have acquired basic suprasegmental patterns they
should be taught patterns which aid in distinguishing
meaning.
He provides in his examples a number of struc-
turally ambiguous sentences.
For each ambiguous sentence
71
Stageberg provides disambiguating pronunciations.
If a
sentence is n ways ambiguous he presents n distinct intonations which is equivalent to claiming that there is a
unique intonation pattern for each different underlying
structure of a given surface form.
The following iliustrates Stageberg's argument.
Adjective + noun + nounhead:
(1) Ahmed worked in a dirty language lab.
(11 is structurally ambiguous.
(p. 65)
According to Stageberg,
the correct intonation would indicate the derivation of
the structure.
Stageberg asserts that the ambiguity re-
sults from failure to recognize (a) language lab to be a
compound noun or (b) dirty language to be a modifier plus
noun combination.
The relation can also be described
equivalently in terms of constituents.
In (a) dirty and
language are immediate constituents of a single constituent, in (b) they are members of different constituents.
(2) and (3) correspond to (a) and (b), respectively.
(3)
(2)
l
adj
dirty
A j p
N
~
N
language
N
lab
I
arl
dirty
language
N
lab
72
Stageberg assumes that a speaker identifies and defines
a sentence :by reference to heard suprasegmental features.
Accordingly a listener should be able to recognize the
constitutent structure of a sentence on the basis of
acoustic cues.
Linguists are beginning to challenge the
assumption that acoustic cues can disambiguate these
kinds of constructions.
As noted on page 39 above,
Lieberman (1965) suggests, on the basis of experimental
results, that linguists base their transcriptions of intonation and stress on their knowledge of sentence structure
rather than their perception of acoustic cues.
Scholes
(1971) has conducted experiments using sentence types
similar to Stageberg's designed to determine the existence
of the alleged acoustic cues for constituent structure in
speech.
Each surface structure has one deep structure in
which major constituent boundaries do or do not separate
contiguous elements.
Scholes had native speakers read
sentences similar in structure to the following examples.
(4) The good flies quickly away.
(5) The good flies quickly die.
Good and flies are dominated by different nodes; there is
a major boundary in (5) and a lesser boundary in (4).
(4) and (5) correspond to (c) and (d) respectively.
73
(c)
(d)
AdA
s
N~P
1J
1
good
flies
go~d
f}ies
Scholes extracted the occurrences of good flies from these
sentences and played to listeners.
The listeners, hear-
ing only go·od £lies, were asked to make a forced choice
indicating the origin o£ the phrase to be either (4) or
(5).
The experiment showed that listeners were unable to
perceive supposed acoustic cues corresponding to constituent boundaries.
Intuitively one might have been inclined to
assume that each occurrence o£ good flies would be distinct.
However, Scholes' experiment indicates that this
is not the case.
Scholes' findings are applicable to
Stageberg's sentences also.
Considering that Scholes
found no acoustic cues to constituent boundaries, one
must question the validity of Stageberg's assumption that
the occurrences of ·air·ty language ·lab can be disambiguated
by intonation.
s·choles' conclusion, however, only ques-
tions rather than discredi·ts Stageberg 1 s assumptions
since Scholes asked his informants to read the sentences
which other native speakers later judged.
It is question-
able that an utterance which is read represents accurately
the spontaneous utterance in respect to intonation.
7:4
Further investigation is needed to elucidate the
relation of acoustic cues to constituent boundaries.
Stageberg makes a distinction between
disambiguating intonation ''patterns which are useful in
distinguishing meanings," and normal intonation, "basic
suprasegmental patterns."
The notion of disambiguating
intonation becomes useful only when one is faced with
restoring an intonation to a written sentence, as an
instructor often asks the ESL student to do.
If a sen-
tence has numerous deep structures, each of which is read
with a different intonation, then those same utterances
produced spontaneously should also have distinct intonations.
I£ there is a one-to-one correspondence between
the deep structure and intonation, rules must specify the
intonation at some point in the derivation of the sentence.
And, if this is true, then the resulting intona-
tion-, -is the normal intonation for -that sentence.
Stageberg•·s normal versus disambiguating distinction is
unnecessary.
There is no ready-made procedure to teach
intonation.
The seeming gap between the linguist and the
teacher is actually a gap between theory and practice.
Schubiger, a linguist and an instructor of English as a
second language, produced a text on intonation intended
for both linguists and students Qf English.
Schubiger
75
(1958) is on the right track because she does not use
citation forms but instead provides the student with possible situations in which various intonations are appropriate.
Much more theoretical work needs to be done in
this area.
The practical value of the manual comes from
Schubiger's ability to utilize her native speaker intuitionsi its theoretical weakness lies in her failure to
formalize those intuitions.
Its merit as a guide for
international students far exceeds its theoretical value.
The dilemma facing the teacher of English as a
Second Language is that there are essentially no guidelines from linguistics regarding intonation.
If linguists
question normal intonation or structural-intonational
relationsnips without offering alternate descriptions,
the teacher has little choice but to continue on as in
the past.
Instructors cannot postpone teaching intonation
until linguists can provide descriptions and rules.·
In-
trospection has been the investigative tool of linguists
for many years; teachers must also draw upon their intuitions.
Until linguistic investigation advances suffici-
ently to allow for a theory of intonation, creative ESL
teachers must rely on the native speakers' ability to
judge and guide the intonation of their pupils.
The pragmatic and information approaches have
much to offer to the instruction of intonation in ESL.
76
Teachers should experiment with such notions as
information, presupposition, and illocutionary force
into their presentations of intonation rather than relying entirely on the old structure-based descriptions.
Students who learn pronunciation through speech act learn
not only the expected and appropriate intonation patterns,
but cultural assumptions as well.
CHAPTER FIVE
CONCLUSIONS
Intonation has been studied for many years.
In
spite of the number of various approaches to the study
no
one has been able to answer
convincingly even the
most basic questions concerning its relation to meaning
and/or structure of language.
The studies based on cur-
rent grammatical theory, and those which are not, produce
a confused and conflicting picture of intonation.
This
inconsistency is attributable to the linguist's reliance
on citation forms and on methods previously established
in the field.
The minimal unit of investigation of intonation
must be the spoken utterance.
It is common to hear that
any particular sentence can be "said" in different ways.
If a speaker nsays" an utterance five different ways she/
he has produced five dif.ferent utterancesi any distinct
spoken utterance of a string of segments is a different
utterance, not merely a variation.
The reliance on the
segmentals represented by the written sentence contributes heavily to the maintenance of this view.
Each in-
vestigator must abide by or answer to the requirements
placed·on the field by prior studies or schools of
thought.
The transformational-generative grammarians
77
78
had to overcome the structuralist reluctance to consider
meaning when they began to recognize the need for a semantic component.
ginning
Similarly, today's linguist is just be-
to return to the belief that necessary informa-
tion be obtained by analyzing the context of language in
use.
The key to the study of intonation rests in
language use.
Using only spontaneous utterances for
investigation reduces the reliance on citation forms or
written representations.
This will entail extensive
field work; the linguist can no longer serve as her/his
own informant.
And moreover, the minimal unit of inves-
tigation must be the utterance.
The reluctance to include
data from language in use can only be neutralized by redefining the bounds of .linguistic investigation.
By
excluding data on meaning in language the linguist ignores valuable information, such as non-literal interpretations found in indirect speech acts, irony, and humor.
The transformational-generative distinction between competence and performance is detrimental to the study of
intonation in particulc,tr and linguistic analysis in general because it minimizes the value of language use and
function.
Pikets anecdote about the student unsuccessfully
attempting to duplicate an intonation contour is
]9
instructive.
Recall that in the absence of the
appropriate context the student could not produce the desired
contour but only the intonation contour appropri-
ate to his immediate context.
The long-discussed problem
of isolating question intonation emphasizes the need for
such considerations as context and illocutionary force.
A question is not a question without question
intonationi question intonation occurs only when the illocutionary force of an utterance is a question.
became clear to me last semester.
This
I audited a class ses-
sion of an introductory transformational granunar course.
The students were given non-derived sentences and asked
to perform certain indicated transformations.
Those
sentences marked for question transformations seemed odd.
As I listened to the answers that followed the reason became clear.
The questions were all syntactically correct,
all well formed examples of yes/no or wh-questionsi but,
they lacked any recognizable question intonation!
The
intonation correctly accompanies the function of the utterancei a response.
The students were not asking ques-
tions, they were producing segmental strings with the
required syntactic structure.
Of the previous studies investigated the one by
Fries (19641 comes the closest to the area of needed
field study.
Fries attempts an analysis of the
80
intonation of yes/no questions in English.
He notes
that natural conversation should be used for investigations of intonation; Fries began to collect the corpus
for study from spontaneous speech.
Unfortunately for the
study, Fries discovered, as do all linguists who do field
study, that a particular grammatical construction does not
occur frequently in natural conversation; yes/no questions
were no exception.
Thus, as a result of listening to ten
hours of taped conversation without sufficient examples
of questions to form a corpus, Fries turns to a game show
as his source of yes/no questions.
The television program
he uses has four panelists who ask a guest yes/no questions in order to discover her/his occupation.
Although
this appears to be a good source of questions, it turns
out to be only a convenient source.
In spite of the fact
that the panelists do not read their lines their utterances are not natural speech.
In discourse a speaker who is
~ing
a question
must employ certain tactics to receive an answer to her/
his inquiry according to linguistic rules.
But, the sit-
uation studied by Fries requires the guest to answer the
utterances of the speakers.
text.
The game provides the con-
The rules of the game eliminate the need of a
panelist to "ask" a question.
The function of the ques-
tion is no longer part of the utterance; the nonlinguistic
81
situation provides the illocutionary force of the
utterance.
Since the guest must respond to whatever
utterance the panelist gives, the panelist does not need
to "ask" questions.
It is not surprising that Fries
found no consistent question intonation.
While the pan-
elists are actors and actresses whose training allows them
to feign the question intonation at times, they are also
native speakers whose competence allows them to recognize
that the employment of question intonation in a situation
defined by outside, non-linguistic rules, is redundant.
Recently I had occasion to record native speakers
of English forming syntactic questions.
At one point in
the interview I instructed the informants to ask the first
five questions that occurred to them about a story they
had just heard.
I might just as well have instructed them
to name five items, in this case five questions.
That is
exactly the response that the instruction elicited:
five
syntactic questions with list or enumeration intonations.
The speakers knew their questions would receive no answer.
In fact,
the speakers, both in the classroom and in the
interviews, wanted no answer to the questions and therefore took no additional linguistic measure to produce
questions.
It is the native speaker's intuition which
keeps the speaker from producing question intonations in
these situations.
The speaker blocks the formation of
82
question intonation since a question in this context
would actually be ungrammatical and unacceptable.
The
instances of question formulation all involve a particular context and function.
The problem is that investiga-
tors until recently have ignored context and function as
not being of linguistic concern.
In a discussion of direct questions Bolinger
(1957a) says the basis for questions is speaker attitudei
this he considers non-linguistic.
I£ Qs have an ultimate basis, it is attitude,
and is non-linguistic. The importance of intonation and gesture in the determination of Qs
indicates this strongly, for such are the
devices with which we externalize our attitudes.
. . • A question appears to be a behavior pattern, and is as real--but as hard to pin down-as other behavior patterns: Aggressiveness,
deference, anxiety, or embarrassment. No inclusive definition can.cover the pattern and
at the same time meet the demands of scientific
parsimony. The only substitute is to isolate
types that can be linguistically defined (pp.
4-5).
Bolinger's attempt to ''isolate [question] types that can
be linguistically defined" is a continuation of the notion
that sentence types exhibit only certain intonation patterns.
The investigator looks for regularities in terms
of syntactic surface structure but none is found.
Syn-
tactic definition is sufficient to isolate questions, as
supported by the classroom examples.
Where no question
actually is "asked" question intonation is absent.
83
Language in use is a legitimate linguistic
concern.
Such considerations as context, fbrce, and at-
titude can be incorporated into a linguistic framework.
Expansions of the linguistic model of a grammar can be
made to accommodate pragmatics.
The relation of the sign
to the user is a vital concern not only for the study of
intonation, but for linguistics in general.
Of particular interest when considering pragmatics
in terms of linguistics, is Fillmore's pragmantax as
presented by Ross (1975).
Pragmantax is not a component
of a linguistic model; it is the model.
As can be deduced
from the name, pragmantax consists of a pragmatic, semantic, and syntactic component.
Each component has its own
rules which interact with rules of other components.
Al-
though Ross states no rules, he emphasizes the need for
the different rule types.
Pragmatic, semantic, and syn-
tactic rules account for different phenomena.
To illu-
strate the need for distinct rule types Ross gives exam-···
ples of such nile violations:
pragmatic, including a
first .... person pronoun in a newspaper article that has no
byline; semantic, asserting that something fell upward;
syntactic, placing the conjunction after the first-person
in a list as in winter, and spring, surmner, fall (p. 2 53) •
Pragmantax provides a system in which rules of the three
components interact to preclude their being studied in
84
isolation from each other.
At this stage pragmantax, a
theory without rules, is merely a guideline for the development of linguistic pragmatics, a reminder that to account for linguistic phenomena all three aspects of language use 7 pragmatic, semantic, and syntactic, must be
considered.
It was beyond the scope of Ross• discussion
to define rigorously the interaction of the components
and their rules.
The theoretical model of generative semantic is
amenable to the incorporation of a pragmatic component.
There are two possible means of incorporation.
represented schematically below.
They are
The representations are
based on the depiction of the generative semantic model
presented by Katz in Semantic Theory (1972).
In Figure 1
the pragmatic component is placed first, insuring that all
input into the semantic component comes by way of pragmatics.
An alternative approach to the one choice shows
the pragmatic component acting as a filter at more than
one level in Figure 2.
The pragmatic component has been
placed to insure that the input into the phonological
component has been filtered through all components.
Here,
as in Figure 1, the initial input from the pragmatic component is maintained.
Distinct from the modification of
the generative model presented in Figure 1 this proposal
would allow the pragmatic component to interact with
other components at mo·re than one level.
'
'
85
Figure 1
pragmatic component
semantic-syntactic
component
semantic representations
lexicon component
transformational
component
----------{s~--------~
phonological component
phopeti~
representation
of S
86
semantic-syntactic
component
I--
(
.
1 semant~c representation~
4J
I::
Q)
I::
iexicon component
0
Po!
s
0·
(.)
0
...
..
·r-1
4J
n1
sO'l
..
-
I IIIJI Il I
transformationaL
component
-
n1
'-l·
0!
~ s]
,_
phonological component
phonetic representation
of
s
-
87
The principal reason for incorporating a
pragmatic component into a linguistic model is to eliminate the need for such ad hoc devices as conversational
postulates.
The conversational postulates proposed by
Gordon and Lakoff (1975) weaken the generative nature of
the model.
Conversational postulates account for non-
literal interpretations of utterances.
The grammar pro-
duces a string with a phonological and semantic reading.
The conversational postulates then reinterpret the literal
meaning to arrive at the non-literal, conveyed, meaning.
Adding a pragmatic component eliminates this unnecessary
step.
Contextual information, speaker-listener relations,
and speaker intent can all be accounted for by the pragmatic component.
Placing the pragmatic component first
prevents the need to reinterpret the output from the
other components.
The speech act is an essential concept within a
pragmatic framework.
The utterance, a naturally produced
stream of segmentals and suprasegmentals, is the minimal
unit of intonational investigation.
The speech act is
the optimal unit for investigation.
The speech act in-
cludes not only the utterance, but the discourse function
of the utterance 1 the intention of the speaker, and the
speaker-hearer relation as well.
Speaker intent and dis-
course function of the utterance combine to form the il.locutionary force.·
88
Organizing the investigation of intonation around
the critical concept of the speech act will enable linguists to describe regularities in the occurrences of intonation contours.
Specifically, the concepts of speech
act and illocutionary force make it possible to isolate
distinct question intonations.
Second, incorporating
considerations of speaker attitude and intention with the
analysis of the segmental string, the speech act eliminates the strict opposition between attitudinal intonation
and grammatical intonation.
Third, the notions of speech
act and presupposition are essential in determining the
grarnrnaticality of an utterance.
And last, this approach
will eliminate the assumed existence of the undefined
"nonnal intonation."
Employing pragmatic considerations,
it is possible to integrate previous discoveries of
grammar-independent approaches into the linguistic framework.
In
fact~
this integration actually increases the
explanatory powe-r of the components as Ross (19751 skillfully demonstrates.
According to Ross, transformations
such as T-slifting can apply to utterances with a specified illocutionary force.
He shows that T-slifting
(sentence lifting) applies not to a particular syntactic
structure but only to utterances with the illocutionary
force of a request.
The suggestion that T-question into-
nation apply only when the illocutionary force is a
question is a similar claim.
89
Consider briefly the following examples of
English intonation.
In each case, a pragmatic approach
will either illuminate constructions not yet fully understood or suggest new avenues of inquiry in the problem
areas of questions, attitudes, presupposition, and normal
intonation.
The suggestion that utterances with the
illocutionary force of questions will exhibit a question
intonation has two parts.
This study considers struc-
tures which are syntactically questions as well as structures which are not.
The term question refers to only
those utterances with the illocutionary force of a questioni syntactic questions will designate wh- and yes/no
questions which have other illocutionary forces.
The
isolation of question intonation is interesting and pertinent to a new approach to intonation because it has
been a long standing, unsolved problem for previous approaches and the native speaker has strong intuitions
about the existence of question intonations which remain
unsupported by linguistic investigation.
The native
speaker, unlike linguists, recognizes questions that are
not necessarily tied to a question structure.
Employing
the concept of speech act and illocutionary forces will
allow linguists to recognize questions apart from their
syntactic forms.
A definition of question on the basis
of illocutionary force alone is in conflict with the
90
standard definition of question on the basis of syntactic
structure.
It will become apparent from the following
examples that utilizing the notion of illocutionary
force is essential.
Consider the first group of utterances.
These
utterances have the syntactic form of questions without
the illocutionary force of questions.
Accordingly, their
illocutionary force prevents their being classified as
questions.
No question intonation can accompany accept-
able occurrences of these utterances.
(1) Professor, may I introduce my parents,
Milton and Betty Bardovi?
An occurrence of (1) should normally receive no answer
other than pleased to meet you or how do you do?.
In
producing the utterance the speaker is performing the
act;
(1) is an introduction, not a question.
The only
acceptable response to (1) is a response to an introduction.
Similarly, a yes or no answer to (2) would be
ludicrous.
(2) May I express my gratitude for your help?
In producing the utterance the speaker is thanking her/
his friend for the help received, not asking a question.
An affirmative answer such as okay,
unacceptable.
~'
go ahead is
Only responses on the order of it was
nothing, glad I could help, I was happy to do it, all
responses to an expression of gratitude, are appropriate.
91
In producing the following utterance the speaker rebukes
the listener.
{3) May I suggest that your behavior as of
late has been quite reprehensible?
Like the examples above this utterance does not function
as a question.
If the listener did respond it would be
to apologize or defend her/himself.
The list could continue indefinitely.
Syntactic
questions can be used for indirect speech acts of any
illocutionary force.
Sag and Liberman (1975) cite others.
(3) Would you stop hitting Gwendolyn?
(4) Why don't you move to California? (p. 488)
Both utterances have literal and indirect interpretations.
When employed to elicit information they would exhibit
question intonations and receive a direct answer.
A
man in therapy for beating his wife might be asked by the
psychiatrist, "Would you stop hitting. Gwendolyn?," and
answer yes or no.
A woman who has always wanted to move
to California but never has, might be asked (4} by a
friend; s.he· would tell her the reasons.
But both utter-
ances can also be indirect speech acts contingent upon
the situation.
If a mother calls out "Would you stop
hitting Gwendolyn" to her son, she expects no answer
other than compliance; she has given a conunand.
Similarly
(4} takes on the form of a suggestion; Hey Baldwin, the
climate here is really bad for you!
suggestion--~vhy
I've got a
don't you move to California?
Sag and
.. 92
Liberman have discussed this point thoroughly, although
with the error of assuming that speech acts need to be
disambiguated, as mentioned earlier on page 66.
Thus we
see that not all utterances of syntactic question form
have the illocutionary force of questionsi consequently
not all receive question intonation.
The second consideration of form and discourse
function, that of syntactically diverse utterances with
the illocutionary force of questions, and their
correspond~
ing intonations, has not been discrissed in recent articles
on intonation.
Nevertheless, speech acts with the illocu-
tionary force of a question with various grammatical
structures do occur.
Interestingly the use of these ques-
tions came to the attention of one of my ESL students.
According to him there were two kinds of questions
in English, not the yes/no questions and wh- questions
taught in class, but real questions and intonation questions.
Syntactically formed questions, "real 0 questions,
were hard for him he confessed.
But if he used just into--
nation and a "regular" sentence everyone could understand
him.
He demonstrated that Are you going? is no more a
question than You: are going with the proper intonation.
He indicated the intonational rise with his hand as he
simultaneously produced the utterance with rising intonation.
93
The following statement can easily be made a
question.
(6) Pao is coming to the party.
Statement forms are the easiest to make into questions
by intonation alone.
to lists also.
Question intonation can be applied
Consider (7).
(7) A woman attempting to cut down on her
grocery order: Carrots? Brocoli?
Eggplant? Tomatoes? Are all these
things necessary?
The items in (7) can each be questioned.
Certain
syntactic forms seem to be restricted in the intonation
contours they can occur with.
More accurately, they are
restricted in their use accor-ding to social situation and
simply would not take on the force of a question.
Com-
mands are examples of utterances with limited occurrence
determined by the social context in which they are to be
employed.
Uldall (1960) notes this limitation with com-
rnands in pa-rticular during her experiment designed to
test attitudinal intonations.
The illocutionary force approach is by no means
restricted to questions.
Once this approach is empiri-
cally justified a taxonomy of speech acts can be developed and other illoctuionary force-intonation correlations
can be investigated.
Details of illocutionary force
classification can be specified later as needed.
94
Speech act analysis may well eliminate the
grammatical-attitudinal division found in intonation
literature.
A framework which allows for syntactic,
semantic, and pragmatic copsiderations can account for
the interaction of all the features and functions of intonation.
The linguistic model with a pragmatic component
accounts for a complete speech act.
Since the same
machinery generates the segmental string, the intonation,
and the meaning, the dilemma of accounting for the lexical
meaning and then explaining its alteration by intonation
contours, as suggested by Pike, vanishes.
The speech act
accounts for the interaction of the segmentals and the
contour:; it is no longer necessary to maintain that each
has distinct meanings apart from the utterance.
The
analysis by speech act includes speaker attitude and
speaker intent, the prime considerations of the attitudinal approach.
Attitudinal investigations can only be
strengthened by integration of a total system.
The sys-
tem, then, encompasses not only attitudinal and grammatical concerns, but p·ragmatic and information considerations as well.
The gramrnaticality of a given intonation and its
co-occurrence with a string of segmentals is relative to
the presuppositions on which it is based.
Schmerling
(1974, 1976) and Bolinger {1972a) have both demonstrated
95
that speaker-hearer presuppositions play an important
role in the assignment of intonation contours.
George
Lakoff (1971) makes a similar claim with reference to
other linguistic features:
It should be clear that the general
principles governing the occurence of too,
but, and contrastive stress can be stated
only in terms of presupposition and deductions based on those presuppositions. This
means that certain sentences will be grammatical only relative to certain presuppositions
and deductions, that is, to certain thoughts
and thought processes to the situations to
which they correspond. This seems to be
wholly natural (pp. 68-69).
Not only is it natural, it is necessary.
The notions o£
presupposition and granunaticality are intimately relatedi
the notion o£ presupposition functions not only to prediet what stress will occur in an utterance previously
determined to be grammatical, but in the actual determination of grarnmaticality itself.
Davison (1975} notes the importance of indirect
speech acts.
According to Davison, genuine irony cannot
be expressed in an indirect speech act with normal intonation and stress.
(.8) and
Therefore, her examples, given here as
(9) can be. grammatical with respect to the mean-
ing conveyed only when accompanied by other than the
syntactically indicated contour.
(8) I love walking five miles in the rain.
(9} It•s a gorgeous morning.
(p. 151)
96
The following utterances are also grammatical
with respect to a specific intonation, the use of which
is determined by presupposition.
(10) a.
b.
c.
You did your homework, didn't you?
You didn't do your homework, did you?
*You did your homework, did you?
In the above set of sentences (a) and (b) are undeniably
grammatical.
in ESL texts.
Examples of them fill pages of exercises
The tag question following the matrix
sentence always exhibits the opposite form of the verb;
if the matrix verb is positive the verb of the tab is
negative and vice versa.
If the speaker attempts to use
(c) to ask a question or clarify doubt, the utterance is
ungrammatical.
The forms (a) and (b) serve that function.
One finds occurrences of (c) in the language, nonetheless.
Utterances of this type are often expressions of disbelief.
A mother responding to her child's request to
watch a favorite television program says You did your
homework, did you? as she is eyeing half finished homework problems abandoned on the young student's desk.
The
intonation of this utterance is different from the intonation of {a) ·and (b).
The co-occurrence of the intonation
and the segments given the presuppositions insures the
gramaticality of the utterance.
The issue of whether presupposition determines
grammaticality and the notion of normal intonation are
97
closely related.
Including the concept of
presupposition in the linguistics framework solves
the problem o£ normal intonation.
There is no normal
intonation; or, conversely, every intonation is normal.
No contour is more primary than another.
Intonational
grammaticality is relative to given presuppositions.
One
would be hard pressed to argue that any one presupposition
is more basic than another.
Schmerling (1971} argues
persuasively against the notion of normal stress and yet
suggests the existence of special presuppositions.
The
following examples illustrate the relation of intonation
to presupposition and grammaticality.
Given that it is Jeff's birthday and all Jeff's
classmates have lined up to deliver the traditional
birthday spankings, the contour of (12) is grammatical,
indeed mandatory.
(12}
'Paul hit Jeff, and then 'Glenn hit him.
On the other hand, given that
Ja.cq'l;:l,~;l;ine
;is left in charge
of her two younger sisters and must hand out the discipline, the pattern in (13) is required.
(13)
'Iris hit Claudia, and then
hitr 'her.
Ja~queline
Neither presupposition is special, or equivalently,
neither is more natural.
One may suggest that this is
an instance o£ anaphora alone, and not related to presupposition.
Lakoff (1971), however, argues that anaphora
98
depends on deductions made from presuppositions.
He
uses the following pair of sentences to illustrate the
relation of anaphora to presuppositions.
(14) The mayor is a Republican and the
used-car dealer is honest too.
(15) The m~yor is a Republican and the
used-car dealer is honest too.
(p.
65)
(14} is grammatical only with the presupposition that
all Republicans are honest.
Honest is unstressed, appar-
ently referring back to is a Republican.
What honest does
refer to is that which can be deduced from the mayor is a
Republican, namely that the mayor is honest.
In contrast,
(15) is grammatical with respect to different presuppositions.
For the contour in (15) to be grammatical, the
mayor must be the used-car dealer, either in reality or
for purposes of irony.
Mayor and used-car dealer are
both unstressed indicating their coreferentiality.
SUMMARY
Adopting a linguistic model which incorporates
pragmatic considerations facilitates the investigation of
intonation in a number of ways.
It would be of immeasur-
able advantage for the isolation of question intonations,
the dissolution of the grammatical/attitudinal boundary,
acceptance of presuppositional grammaticality, and the
abandonment of the unnecessary quest for normal intonation.
In order to test this proposal empirically, the
99
investigator must collect a corpus from spontaneous
conversations; she/he must note the contexts.
Collecting
natural data as well as recording the context of the conversation is no easy task.
But the clues to the descrip-
tion of the intonational systems of English lie in the
field.
Linguists can accurately describe English intona-
tion only after careful investigation of native speakers'
conscious and unconscious manipulation of the features in
actual language communicative situations.
The framework
suggested above may prove useful for such investigations.
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