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All vocal languages use pitch pragmatically in intonation—for instance for emphasis, to convey surprise or irony, or to pose a question. Tonal languages such as Chinese and Hausa use intonation in addition to using pitch for distinguishing words. [1] Many writers have attempted to produce a list of distinct functions of intonation.
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 ...
Boundaries between intonation units are often associated with grammatical or syntactic boundaries; these are marked by such prosodic features as pauses and slowing of tempo, as well as "pitch reset" where the speaker's pitch level returns to the level typical of the onset of a new intonation unit.
A primary stress in a word is the strongest syllable with the highest pitch, longest duration, and loudest volume. A secondary stress is the weaker of the two, with its prosodic features falling between an unstressed and stressed syllable. Its pitch is higher than the tonic, but lower than the primary stress.
This finding makes sense if we consider the rising tone to consist of an L tone followed by an H tone, making it possible to describe one- and two-syllable words using the same set of tones. [2] Bruce also found that alignment of the peak of a Swedish pitch accent, rather than the alignment of a rise or fall, reliably distinguished between the ...
As poetry is a vocal art, the speaker brings their own experience to it, changing it according to their own sensibilities, [3] intonation, the matter of sound making sense; controlled through pitch and stress, poems are full of invisible italicized contrasts. [2] Reading poetry aloud also makes clear the "pause" as an element of poetry. [4]
For example, when emphasis is produced through pitch alone, it is called pitch accent, and when produced through length alone, it is called quantitative accent. [3] When caused by a combination of various intensified properties, it is called stress accent or dynamic accent; English uses what is called variable stress accent.
These properties can be those of stress, intonation (a single pitch and rhythm contour), or tonal patterns. Prosodic units occur at a hierarchy of levels , from the syllable , the metrical foot and phonological word to the intonational unit (IU) and to a complete utterance . [ 1 ]