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.
Old English is essentially a distinct language from Modern English and is virtually impossible for 21st-century unstudied English-speakers to understand. Its grammar was similar to that of modern German: nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs had many more inflectional endings and forms , and word order was much freer than in Modern English.
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 pitch accents of English used in the ToBI prosodic transcription system are: H*, L*, L*+H, L+H*, and H+!H*. [7] Most theories of prosodic meaning in English claim that pitch accent placement is tied to the focus, or the most important part, of the phrase. Some theories of prosodic marking of focus are concerned only with nuclear pitch accents.
The English spoken in the West Indies, [103] in Africa [104] and in India [105] are probably better characterized as syllable-timed, though the lack of an agreed scientific test for categorizing an accent or language as stress-timed or syllable-timed may lead one to doubt the value of such a characterization.
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 1886, a group of French and English language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, formed what would be known from 1897 onwards as the International Phonetic Association (in French, l'Association phonétique internationale). [6] The idea of the alphabet had been suggested to Passy by Otto Jespersen.