IIntonation

The tone-unit

It was explained that many of the world's languages are tone languages, in which substituting one distinctive tone for another on a particular word or morpheme can cause a change in the dictionary ("lexical") meaning of that word or morpheme, or in some aspect of its grammatical categorization. Although tones or pitch differences are used for other purposes, English is one of the languages that do not use tone in this way. Languages such as English are sometimes called intonation languages. In tone languages the main suprasegmental contrastive unit is the tone, which is usually linked to the phonological unit that we call the syllable. It could be said that someone analyzing the function and distribution of tones in a tone language would be mainly occupied in examining utterances syllable by syllable, looking at each syllable as an independently variable item. Five tones found on English one-syllable utterances were introduced, and if English were spoken in isolated monosyllables, the job of tonal analysis would be a rather similar one to that described for tone languages. However, when we look at continuous speech in English utterances we find that these tones can only be identified on a small number of particularly prominent syllables. For the purposes of analyzing intonation, a unit generally greater in size than the syllable is needed, and this unit is called the tone- unit; in its smallest form the tone-unit may consist of only one syllable, so it would in fact be wrong to say that it is always composed of more than one syllable. The tone-unit is difficult to define, and one or two examples may help to make it easier to understand the concept. As explained, examples used to illustrate intonation transcription are usually given in spelling form, and you will notice that no punctuation is used; the reason for this is that intonation and stress are the vocal equivalents of written punctuation, so that when these are transcribed it would be unnecessary or even confusing to include punctuation as well.

Let us begin with a one-syllable utterance:

/you

We underline syllables that carry a tone, as explained at the end. Now consider this utterance:

is it /you

The third syllable is more prominent than the other two and carries a rising tone. The other two syllables will normally be much less prominent, and be said on a level pitch. Why do we not say that each of the syllables 'is' and 'it' carries a level tone? This is a difficult question that will be examined more holly later; for the present I will answer it (rather unsatisfactorily) by saying that it is unusual for a syllable said on a level pitch to be so prominent that it would be described as carrying a level tone. To summarize the analysis of 'is it /you' so far, it is an utterance of three syllables, consisting of one tone- unit; the only syllable that carries a tone is the third one. From now on, a syllable which carries a tone will be called a tonic syllable. It has been mentioned several times that tonic syllables have a high degree of prominence; prominence is, of course, a property of stressed syllables, and a tonic syllable not only carries a tone (which is something related to intonation) but also a type of stress that will be called tonic stress. (Some writers use the terms nucleus and nuclear stress for tonic syllable and tonic stress.)

The example can now be extended:

vJohn is it /you

A fall-rise tone is used quite commonly in calling someone's name. If there is a clear pause (silence) between 'vJohn' and 'is it /you', then, according to the definition of an utterance, there are two utterances; however, it is quite likely that a speaker would say 'vJohn is it /you' with no pause, so that the four syllables would make up a single utterance. In spite of the absence of any pause, the utterance would normally be regarded as divided into two tone-units: 'vJohn' and 'is it /you'. Since it is very difficult to lay down the conditions for deciding where the boundaries between tone-units exist, the discussion of this matter must wait until later.

It should be possible to see now that the tone-unit has a place in a range of phonological units that are in a hierarchical relationship: speech consists of a number of utterances (the largest units that we shall consider); each utterance consists of one or more tone-units; each tone-unit consists of one or more feet; each foot consists of one or more syllables; each syllable consists of one or more phonemes.