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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 ...
For example, in most Norwegian dialects, the word bønder (farmers) is pronounced with tone 1, while tone 2 is used when pronouncing bønner (beans or prayers). Differences in spelling occasionally let readers distinguish written words, but most minimal pairs are written alike.
But in some circumstances this phrasal tone does not appear, for example, when the word is the subject of a sentence or qualified by a number. The automatic phrasal tones are not as high-pitched as lexical tones. [4] Automatic phrasal tones are also added at the end of lexically-toned words.
Tone sandhi occurs to some extent in nearly all tonal languages, manifesting itself in different ways. [1] Tonal languages, characterized by their use of pitch to affect meaning, appear all over the world, especially in the Niger-Congo language family of Africa, and the Sino-Tibetan language family of East Asia, [2] as well as other East Asian languages such as Kra-Dai, and Papuan languages.
The easiest stylistic device to identify is a simile, signaled by the use of the words "like" or "as". A simile is a comparison used to attract the reader's attention and describe something in descriptive terms. Example: "From up here on the fourteenth floor, my brother Charley looks like an insect scurrying among other insects." (from "Sweet ...
A classic example of a nasal carrying a tone: To form a locative from a noun, one of the possible procedures involves simply suffixing a low tone [ŋ̩] to the noun. To form the locative meaning "on the grass" one suffixes -ng to the word [ʒʷɑŋ̩] jwang ‡ [_ ¯ ], giving jwanng ‡ [_ ¯ _ ] [ʒʷɑŋ̩ŋ̩], with the two last syllabic nasals having contrasting tones.
For example, in This is fun, this is is at pitch 2, and fun starts at level 3 and glides down to level 1. But if the last prominent syllable is not the last syllable of the utterance, the pitch fall-off is a step. For example, in That can be frustrating, That can be has pitch 2, frus-has level 3, and both syllables of -trating have pitch 1. [22]