Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
British descriptions of English intonation can be traced back to the 16th century. [5] Early in the 20th century the dominant approach in the description of English and French intonation was based on a small number of basic "tunes" associated with intonation units: in a typical description, Tune 1 is falling, with final fall, while Tune 2 has a ...
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.
English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar (but not identical) phonological system.
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 ...
The English spoken in the isolated Pacific islands of Norfolk and Pitcairn shows evidence of the islands' long isolation from the world. In the case of Pitcairn, the local creole, Pitkern, shows strong evidence of its rural English 19th-century origins, with an accent that has traces of both the English southwest and Geordie.
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 ...
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!
Some languages, such as English, are said to be stress-timed languages; that is, stressed syllables appear at a roughly constant rate and non-stressed syllables are shortened to accommodate that, which contrasts with languages that have syllable timing (e.g. Spanish) or mora timing (e.g. Japanese), whose syllables or moras are spoken at a ...