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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 ...
Authors create tone through the use of various other literary elements, such as diction or word choice; syntax, the grammatical arrangement of words in a text for effect; imagery, or vivid appeals to the senses; details, facts that are included or omitted; and figurative language, the comparison of seemingly unrelated things for sub-textual ...
Tones are linked to stressed syllables: an asterisk is used to indicate a tone that must be aligned with a stressed syllable. In addition, there are phrasal accents which signal the pitch at the end of an intermediate phrase (e.g. H − and L − ), and boundary tones at full phrase boundaries (e.g. H% and L%).
Such sounds may be tones, vowels, or consonants. 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 ...
For example, the present habitual tense has tones on the first and penultimate syllables, the recent past has a tone after the tense-marker -na-, the subjunctive has a tone on the final syllable and the potential is toneless. The tones apply, with minor variations, to all verbs, whether the stem is long or short: ndímafotokóza "I (usually ...
The term boundary tone refers to a rise or fall in pitch that occurs in speech at the end of a sentence or other utterance, or, if a sentence is divided into two or more intonational phrases, at the end of each intonational phrase. It can also refer to a low or high intonational tone at the beginning of an utterance or intonational phrase.
For example, /srs may be attached to the end of a message to indicate that the message is meant to be interpreted in a serious manner, as opposed to, for example, being a joke (which is commonly represented as /j). Tone indicators are used to explicitly state the author's intent, instead of leaving the message up to interpretation. [6] [4]
Cantonese changed tones (also called pinjam; [1] traditional Chinese: 變音; simplified Chinese: 变音; pinyin: biànyīn; Jyutping: bin3jam1; Cantonese Yale: binyām) occur when a word's tone becomes a different tone due to a particular context or meaning. A "changed" tone is the tone of the word when it is read in a particular lexical or ...