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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?"
A response may echo the content of a stimulus and have similar intonation to an echo question, but follow the syntactic rules of a normal question (including wh-fronting and subject-auxiliary inversion), as in: A: He saw a crocodile. B: What did he see? Some authors include these among echo questions [3] [4] while others do not. [1]
The stress placed on words within sentences is called sentence stress or prosodic stress. That is one of the three components of prosody , along with rhythm and intonation . It includes phrasal stress (the default emphasis of certain words within phrases or clauses ), and contrastive stress (used to highlight an item, a word or part of a word ...
The high rising terminal (HRT), also known as rising inflection, upspeak, uptalk, or high rising intonation (HRI), is a feature of some variants of English where declarative sentences can end with a rising pitch similar to that typically found in yes–no questions.
Overall the study of prosody has lagged other areas of linguistics. Within the study of English prosody, topics other than read speech and intonation have lagged. In any case, no comprehensive and complete description of English prosody is as yet available, [14] which makes prosody a challenge for both learners and teachers of English.
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 ...
Languages may use both syntax and prosody to distinguish interrogative sentences (which pose questions) from declarative sentences (which state propositions). Syntax refers to grammatical changes, such as changing word order or adding question words; prosody refers to changes in intonation while speaking.
If the sentence is pronounced in the second way, because the word Anna is the topic of the sentence and does not give new information, it will have a slight rise in pitch on the second syllable (see the illustration). In this case it is transcribed by Pierrehumbert as H* L − H%. [6] A boundary tone can also begin a sentence or intonational ...