Perception of Tone, Intonation and Focus - Dissertation Example

?[The [The [The Perception of Tone, Intonation and Focus Introduction Using language is a very complex and abstract procedure which is well adapted to a certain degree of sophistication, but which, in a number of trivial circumstances, may economically be replaced by some more direct means of communication such as gesturing, either with the hands or the shoulders, or with the glottis. The concomitant use of language is called intonation. Since intonation is produced by the vocal chords, and since the vocal chords are par excellence the organs of speech, intonation cannot be anything but speech. This dictum sounds very much like common sense. The double-articulation theory and any definition of language based upon it leaves a wide margin, for which the name 'prosody' is today a widespread designation. (PhonoMei, 272) Tones, or as some people call them tonemes, have exactly the same function as phonemes: they are distinctive, which means that the speaker, at a certain point in the message, will have to choose between a number of them in order to say just what he wants to say. It is, of course, perfectly immaterial whether the choice is conscious or not. If tones are not considered distinctive features of vocalic phonemes, it is because they are usually found to affect, not a vowel phoneme as such, but a syllabic nucleus, often made up of two or more phonemes or even more than one syllable. Chinese Languages and Intonational Features Of more importance for the history of Chinese is the way in which glottal features can affect vowels: Voiced aspiration, or "murmur," easily spreads from a consonant into an adjacent vowel, and the effects of this have been important in the development of tonal systems in Chinese and Southeast Asian languages. (Chang, 636) The dissimilation between voiced aspiration at the beginning and end of syllables, known as Grassman's Law, that occurred in Sanskrit and Ancient Greek was probably the result of the spreading of the voiced aspiration into the vowel in this way. A quite different kind of glottal activity combined with a vowel is called "creaky voice." It stands between normal voicing and glottal stop in the same way that "murmur," or voiced glottal friction, stands between normal voicing and voiceless glottal friction, or h. In Burmese the so-called "creaky tone" is found in syllables that formerly ended in a glottal stop and still have a weak glottal closure, contrasting to the strong final glottal stop that is derived from method suggested above for indicating the glottal features of obstruents. (Ting, 632) One could suggest'. Creaky sonorants would then be written: a + ?, m + ?, and so on. It is not known whether all languages have this same binary structure for macrosegments. Many reports on different languages pass over the matter of intonation in complete silence. A few specifically state that there are no intonational differences which can be subsumed within the description of the linguistic system, even though there are ups and downs of pitch which seem to be semi-organized culturally, at least to show some correlation with speaker's mood. Since detailed and effective intonational analysis is relatively recent, statements of the kind are not to be trusted; more thorough work with such languages may reveal full-fledged, if simple, intonational systems. If, indeed, there are languages in which no distinctive intonational differences are to be found, then this affords us a typologic criterion. Not all utterances in a language conform neatly to the macrosegment-pause-intonation-remainder scheme. (Tsay, 88) Almost always one is forced to recognize that some utterings are broken off before they reach a normal boundary between macrosegments. If a man is shot, or has to sneeze or hiccup, in the middle of a sentence, it is easy enough to regard the linguistically relevant event as having been cut off by an intrusive agent, and to discard the particular event as irrelevant for linguistic analysis. But in the normal process of speaking, such interruptions, or medial hesitations, occur with no obvious intrusive agent, and these events cannot be regarded as unpatterned. There are even hesitation-forms, varieties of speech-sound made while "pausing to think," which differ greatly from language to language. (Snider, 18) These matters are not marginal in any statistical sense: they occur very frequently, though more in the speech of some individuals than in that of others. Significance of Intonation, Tone and Focus There is, of course, no reason why an intonational system must always be built out of the types of elements which it is convenient to recognize in English, and certainly no reason why the pitch of the voice should function as the principle phonetic raw-material for every intonational system. On the other hand, a language which makes phonologic use of pitch in other ways is not necessarily precluded from using it intonationally. Two examples deserve brief mention. In Mandarin, the pitch contours required by intonation are spread through the succession of syllables which individually carry pitches or contours of an accentual system so that the actual pitch at any point is a sort of geometrical sum of the two factors. (Ohala, 311) Thus the tones and stresses are identical in /tui ma?/ 'Is that right?' and in /tui le./ 'That's right,' both of which have been falling tone, and loud stress, on the first syllable, no tone and no stress on the second. But in the first of the two the fall of pitch is only to middle register, and the second syllable is pronounced in the middle register; in the second of the two, the fall is all the way to low register, and the second syllable is pronounced in the low register; this difference is intonational. All-or-none features, logically like the English /?/, are known in some instances where the other details of the intonational system remain obscure. (Hyman, 115) The French phenomenon traditionally called the accent d'insistence is of this sort. This manifests itself, when present, on the first syllable of a macrosegment which begins with a consonant--thus not necessarily on the initial syllable, which may not begin with a consonant; it lengthens the consonant and places greater articulatory force both on the consonant and on the following vowel. Thus the word impossible, pronounced as a macrosegment with this feature, has a lengthened p, and the -po- is stressed and has higher pitch. (Chan, 98) Some of the above information is, of course, not very reliable. Investigators have been attempting intonational studies for a fairly long time, but earlier reports are so different in approach that they are hard to interpret, and the most recent studies show a variety of technique which clearly reflects differences among the investigators as much as, or more than, differences among the languages studied. This is all to the good, since only by trying many alternative techniques of analysis can we ever hope to develop a unified technique which will both yield valid results in individual cases and also render cross-language comparisons easier. One of the most interesting of the newer approaches is that used by Samuel for Korean: he simply precedes each syllable by /^/ if it is higher in pitch than the preceding syllable (or, if directly after pause, if it contains a rise in pitch) and by /v/ if it is lower in pitch than the preceding (or, if directly after pause, if it contains a fall in pitch). (Samuel, 110) It is impossible to judge, without extensive independent work, whether this device actually covers all the intonational contrasts of the language. In any case, quite obviously the time for a general typology of intonational systems has not yet arrived. Burmese, Thai, Vietnamese, many dialects of Chinese but not all, and a good number of less well-known languages resemble Cantonese both in the presence of syllable juncture and in having tones with whole syllables as their domain. (Bao, 116) Mandarin falls, somewhat marginally, into this type. In many ways Mandarin is like Cantonese. The tones of Mandarin, like those of Cantonese, have as their domain whole microsegments. (Cheng, 142) Unlike Cantonese, some Mandarin microsegments carry no tone; since in any macrosegment there is at least one microsegment bearing a tone, toneless microsegments are satellites to those with tones. Also unlike Cantonese, there are a fair number of microsegments in Mandarin containing two peaks instead of just one, with an intervening interlude. Thus /sr? + ?m?/ 'what' carries a single tone (rising), and is flanked by microjuncture but contains none; but it has two peaks, both consisting of the mid vowel /?/, the first preceded by an onset /sr/, and the two separated by an interlude /m/. This /m/ goes with both the preceding and the following peak in a way which is, phonetically as well as structurally, much like the way the medial /m/ of English hammer goes both with the preceding stressed vowel and the following unstressed vowel. (Wang, 102) Mandarin interludes are all fairly simple, and they are not numerous; in the flow of speech /m/ is probably the most frequent. (Yip, 141) Furthermore, there are apparently never more than two peaks in a single microsegment. Despite this more complex structure, it is possible, as in Cantonese, to predict the location of peaks in terms of the location of microjunctures and the intervening sequences of contoids and vocoids. (Ramsey, 231) Thus there is a class of two vowels, /?a/, which are always peaks; there is a class of semivowels /i u r u/, which occur as peaks in syllables containing no vowels, but as parts of onsets or of complex peaks when flanked by a vowel; there is a class of semiconsonants /s c c'/ which occur as onsets with a distinctive peak, but which also occur as the only constituent of a microsegment save for the tone if any, and which in the latter case are followed by an automatic peak vowel of the [i] type; and there is a larger class of consonants, which occur only as onsets or as parts of complex peaks. (Chao, 81-82) There is some evidence to suggest that Mandarin has an internal open juncture of an opener variety than microjuncture--call it, say, mesojuncture, since if it really exists and occurs within macrosegments its occurrences break a macrosegment into one or more mesosegments, each in turn composed of one or more microsegments. (Lehiste, 169) But it is possible that a more thorough investigation of Mandarin intonation will show that the difference between this intermediate type of open juncture and either microjuncture or macrosegment-boundary, and the location of apparent mesojuncture occurrences, are both subsumable within the intonational picture. (Goldsmith, 77) In any case, this possible mesojuncture does not materially bear on our problem here. In English, syllables with loud stress are strongly isolable, but those with medial stress or with none are not isolable at all. In Cantonese, where all syllables can be classed according to which tone is present, apparently all the types are isolable. But in Mandarin, where some macrosegments have no tone, only the type with a tone is isolable. (Pulleyblank, 192) In some cases of this kind, we are confronted with an accentual system. In other cases we are not. It seems very difficult to define formally the line of demarcation between the two situations. We should like a definition of "accentual system" which would include the tones of Cantonese and Mandarin, the stresses of Mandarin, English, Spanish, and perhaps the syllable peaks of Nootka. But we should not like to include also the difference between microsegment-initial syllables with and without an onset in English, although those constitute two clearly distinguishable and mutually exclusive structural types, both of them strongly isolable. (Halliday, 54) Tone languages use differences of pitch to differentiate between lexical meanings. (Anderson, 57) Mostly this is not a feature of European languages, but Ewe, Yoruba, Igbo, Xhosa, Zulu and Kalenjin are all African examples, and Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese are all Asian examples. As an exemplification of the kinds of tonal system that there are, we can take Mandarin Chinese. The tones, which are associated with the whole syllable and the lexical meanings of the words, are given in the following Table 1 Table 1 There are many ways of symbolizing tonal differences; the above is just one way, using the IPA symbols. (Ladefoged, 254) The main sentence stress, which is accompanied by a marked change of pitch, and is called the tonic stress, falls on the word of the sentence that is considered to be the focus of new information. If the word is a monosyllable, then the pitch changes on that; if it is polysyllabic, then the pitch change runs over the whole word and sometimes over accompanying unstressed words as well, though the tonic stress still falls on the stressed syllable of the word. (Chen, 302) The examples in (Table 2) show how the focus of the utterance, which otherwise has the same lexical content, can be moved to different lexical items. The tonic syllable is given in bold. Try saying each one of the possibilities and say what you think the difference in focus signifies. Note, too, that it is possible to split up what is one syntactic whole into two or more groups of syllables, known as intonation groups or tone groups, by having more than one tonic stress. Table 2 Conclusion The cues that people use in interchanges to judge what is going on, for example, whose turn it is, what the communicative intentions of the speaker are, the assumed relationships between the interlocutors, but they include fairly simple markers of endings of turns and hesitation phenomena. In general, English, like many languages, uses a rising intonation to indicate a question or an intention to continue speaking, whereas a low fall at the end of an utterance indicates finality. The attitudinal significance of pitch variations is even more difficult to pin down, but in English the greater the gap between the highest and lowest pitch levels in an utterance, the more emotionally involved the speaker is assumed to be. Thus, a generally low pitch ending in a low fall tends to indicate lack of interest and/or boredom. On the other hand, a low rise followed by a jump in the pitch to high and then a fall indicates enthusiasm. Works Cited Anderson, Stephen R. “Tone Features”. In Tone: A Linguistic Survey, edited by Victoria A. Fromkin. New York: Academic Press. (1978). 57 Bao, Zhiming “On the Nature of Tone”. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT. (1990). 116 Chan, Marjorie K.-M. “Contour-Tone Spreading and Tone Sandhi in Danyang Chinese”. Ms., Ohio State University, Columbus. (1989). 98 Chang, Kun “Tonal Developments among Chinese Dialects”. Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica (1975). 46, 636. Chao, Yuen Ren “A System of Tone-Letters”. Reprinted in Fangyan (1980). 81-82. Chen, Matthew “An Overview of Tone Sandhi Phenomena across Chinese Dialects”. Ms., University of California, San Diego. (1986). 302 Cheng, Chin-chuan “A Synchronic Phonology of Mandarin Chinese”. The Hague: Mouton. (1973). 142 Goldsmith, John “Autosegmental Phonology”, Ph.D. dissertation, MIT. (1976). 77 Halliday, M. A. K. “Intonation and grammar in British English”. The Hague: Mouton. (1967) 54 Hyman, Larry, and Russell G. Schuh “Universals of Tone Rules: Evidence from West Africa”. Linguistic Inquiry (1974). 5, 115. Lehiste, Use “Suprasegmentals”. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. (1970). 169 Ohala, John J. “Speculations on Pitch Regulation”. Phonetica (1977). 34, 311. PhonoMei, Tsu-lin “Tones and Prosody in Middle Chinese”. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (1970). 11, 272. Pulleyblank, Edwin “The Nature of the Middle Chinese Tones and their Development to Early Mandarin”. Journal of Chinese Linguistics (1978). 6, 192. Ramsey, S. Robert “The Languages of China. Princeton”: Princeton University Press. (1987). 231 Samuel E. Martin “Reference Grammar of Korean: A Complete Guide to the Grammar and History of the Korean Language”. Turtle Publishers, (2006) 110 Snider, Keith L. “Towards the Representation of Tone: A Three-dimensional Approach”. In ‘Features, Segmental Structure and Harmony Processes’, edited by Harry der van Hulst and Norval Smith. Dordrecht: Foris. (1988). 18 Ting, Pang-hsin “Some Aspects of Tonal Development in Chinese Dialects”. Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology (1982). 53, 632. Tsay, S.-C. Jane “Phonological Pitch”. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson. (1994). 88 Wang, William S.-Y. “Phonological Features of Tone”. International Journal of American Linguistics (1967). 33, 102. Yip, Moira “The Tonal Phonology of Chinese”. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT. (1980). 141 Read More