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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
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.
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]
For example, the prosody of "awww", when used as an exclamation of praise for a cute baby, involves creaky nasal voice, high pitch that is generally flat except with small initial and final peaks, relatively loud volume, and extended duration. The importance of non-pitch features can be seen in two uses of pitch downsteps. [10]
Some writers (e.g., O'Connor and Arnold) [7] have described intonation entirely in terms of pitch, while others (e.g., Crystal) [8] propose that "intonation" is a combination of several prosodic variables. English intonation is often said to be based on three aspects: The division of speech into units; The highlighting of particular words and ...
For example, the chord formed by pitches in the ratios 3:5:7 has a very similar pattern of intonation sensitivity to the just major chord, formed by 4:5:6—more similar than does the minor chord. The major or minor triad may be used to form the diatonic scale and the 3:5:7 triad may be used to form the Bohlen–Pierce scale .
Pierrehumbert gives the example of the sentence This is my sister Mary.This can be pronounced in two ways, either as a single intonational phrase with a single high pitch on the first syllable of Mary (L L L L L H L), or as two intonational phrases with a high pitch both on sister and on Mary (L L L H L H L).
In a similar vein, the effectively obsolete staveless tone letters were once doubled for an emphatic rising intonation ˶ and an emphatic falling intonation ˵ . [ 87 ] Length is commonly extended by repeating the length mark, which may be phonetic, as in [ĕ e eˑ eː eːˑ eːː] etc., as in English shhh!