In linguistics, intonation is the variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression, to signal the illocutionary act performed by a sentence, or to regulate the flow of discourse.
Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, its effects almost always work hand-in-hand with other prosodic features.
Intonation is distinct from tone, the phenomenon where pitch is used to distinguish words (as in Mandarin) or to mark grammatical features (as in Kinyarwanda).
However, for general purposes the International Phonetic Alphabet offers the two intonation marks shown in the box at the head of this article.
All vocal languages use pitch pragmatically in intonation—for instance for emphasis, to convey surprise or irony, or to pose a question.
Each nucleus carries one of a small number of nuclear tones, usually including fall, rise, fall-rise, rise-fall, and possibly others.
This "Standard British" treatment of intonation in its present-day form is explained in detail by Wells[10] and in a simplified version by Roach.
[11] Halliday saw the functions of intonation as depending on choices in three main variables: Tonality (division of speech into intonation units), Tonicity (the placement of the tonic syllable or nucleus) and Tone (choice of nuclear tone);[12] these terms (sometimes referred to as "the three T's") have been used more recently.
[10] Research by Crystal[13][14] emphasized the importance of making generalizations about intonation based on authentic, unscripted speech, and the roles played by prosodic features such as tempo, pitch range, loudness and rhythmicality in communicative functions traditionally attributed to intonation alone.
Intonation is analysed purely in terms of pitch movements and "key" and makes little reference to the other prosodic features usually thought to play a part in conversational interaction.
(The important work of Kenneth Pike on the same subject[18] had the four pitch levels labelled in the opposite way, with (1) being high and (4) being low).
A more recent approach to the analysis of intonation grew out of the research of Janet Pierrehumbert[23] and developed into the system most widely known by the name of ToBI (short for "Tones and Break Indices").
Most commonly in informal speech, a yes/no question is indicated by a sharply rising pitch alone, without any change or rearrangement of words.
There are different studies [Gill and Gleason (1969), Malik (1995), Kalra (1982), Bhatia (1993), Joshi (1972 & 1989)][33][34][35] that explain intonation in Punjabi, according to their respective theories and models.
Chander Shekhar Singh carried forward a description of the experimental phonetics and phonology of Punjabi intonation based on sentences read in isolation.
[38] Falling intonation is said to be used at the end of questions in some languages, including Hawaiian, Fijian, and Samoan and in Greenlandic.
Post and F. Nolan) to study the intonation of nine urban accents of British English in five different speaking styles has resulted in the IViE Corpus and a purpose-built transcription system.
[41] The languages described are American English, British English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Bulgarian, Greek, Finnish, Hungarian, Western Arabic (Moroccan), Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese and Beijing Chinese.
Those with congenital amusia show impaired ability to discriminate, identify and imitate the intonation of the final words in sentences.