Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. [1] All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously ...
An example: "Charlie surveyed the classroom but it was really his mother congratulating himself for snatching the higher test grade, the smug smirk on his face growing brighter and brighter as he confirmed the inferiority of his peers." The tone here is one of arrogance; the quip "inferiority of his peers" shows Charlie's belief in his own prowess.
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. For example, the English question "Does Maria speak Spanish or French
For example, speakers of urban dialects in the west of Slovenia without distinctive length fail to introduce a quantitative opposition when they speak the standard language. [citation needed] The older accentual system is tonal and free (jágoda 'strawberry', malína 'raspberry', gospodár 'master, lord'). There are three kinds of accents ...
Empirically, one report proposes that HRT in American English and Australian English is marked by a high tone (high pitch or high fundamental frequency) beginning on the final accented syllable near the end of the statement (the terminal), and continuing to increase in frequency (up to 40%) to the end of the intonational phrase. [1]
Many tone languages have contour tones, which move from one level to another. For example, Mandarin Chinese has four lexical tones. The high tone is level, without contour; the falling tone is a contour from high pitch to low; the rising tone a contour from mid pitch to high, and, when spoken in isolation, the low tone takes on a dipping ...
For example, while the words "hard" and "singer" would be pronounced [hɑːd] and [ˈsɪŋə] in Received Pronunciation, they would be pronounced [hɑɹd] and [ˈsɪŋɚ] in General American. Exceptions are certain traditional accents found in eastern New England , New York City , and the Southern United States , plus African-American English .
Some analyses use a larger number of boundary tones than L% and H%; for example for Dutch, Gussenhoven uses L%, H%, and % (no boundary tone) at the end of an utterance, and %L, %H, and %HL at the beginning; [11] while for Italian Frota and Prieto posit six boundary tones, written L%, H%, LH%, HL%, L!H%, and H!H% (where !H represents a ...