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Here, as is common with wh-questions, there is a rising intonation on the question word, and a falling intonation at the end of the question. In many descriptions of English, the following intonation patterns are distinguished: Rising Intonation means the pitch of the voice rises over time. Falling Intonation means that the pitch falls with time.
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.
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 ...
A rising boundary tone can often be heard internally in a sentence in some languages, for example, to mark a topic, [13] to mark off items in a list, or following the subordinate clause in a sentence such as "If you like it, please buy it". [14] (See further: Chichewa tones#Boundary tones.)
Inquisitive rising declaratives are characterized phonologically by a low pitch accent which rises to a high boundary tone, or L* H-H% in the ToBI system. Their discourse effects are similar to biased questions in that they seek information from the addressee while conveying that the speaker already have certain expectations.
Chart invented by the Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao illustrating the contours of the four tones of Standard Chinese. When the pitch descends, the contour is called a falling tone; when it ascends, a rising tone; when it descends and then returns, a dipping or falling-rising tone; and when it ascends and then returns, it is called a peaking or rising-falling tone.
In more complex types of pitch-accent languages, although there is still only one accent per word, there is a systematic contrast of more than one pitch-contour on the accented syllable, for example, H vs. HL in the Colombian language Barasana, [5] accent 1 vs. accent 2 in Swedish and Norwegian, rising vs. falling tone in Serbo-Croatian, and a ...
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 ...