Functions of Intonation

1. Intonation and syntactic structure

1a) Here's a word you can look ûp. ("Up" is a particle.)
b) Here's a chimney you can lóok ùp. ("Up" is a preposition.)

2 a) Bond had instructions to léàve. (So he left.)
b) Bond had instrúctions to lèave. (So he left them.)

In the preceding examples, placement of the accent encodes a difference in syntactic structure. In the following examples, the major intonational phrase may be broken into two intermediate phrases, to denote a higher syntactic boundary.

3 a) Have you seen any Martians who have green nôses? (One phrase: restrictive relative.)
b) Have you seen any Mârtians, who have green nôses? (Two phrases: non-restrictive relative.)

4 a) He can't see cléàrly. (One accent, one phrase.)
b) He can't sêe, clêarly. (Two accents, two phrases.)

In earlier descriptive studies, this phrasing was regarded as a question of two intonational boundaries:

In contemporary approaches, intonation is characterized by a constituent structure (the prosodic hierarchy). In its simplest form, this is a simple two level structure:

Although intonation may indicate some aspects of syntactic structure, intonational phrasing is not isomorphic to syntactic structure. Richer hierarchical structures were developed in Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988).

2. Intonation and meaning

5 a) John_i called Bill_j a Republican, and then hé_j insulted hîm_i. (Implies that to call someone a Republican is an insult.)
b) John_i called Bill_j a Republican | and thén he_i insûlted him_j. (Implies that to call someone a Republican is not an insult.)

6 a) I dídn't gò | because my hâir was dìrty.
b) I dídn't go because my hâir was dǐrty. (Implies that I went for some other reason.)

3. Intonation and discourse structure

3.1. Focus

Pierrehumbert (1980), Fig. 1.5A	Pierrehumbert (1980), Fig. 1.5B
Pierrehumbert (1980), Fig. 1.5B

Refer to fig. 1.5 A-C above. The text is the same in each case. In fig. 1.5 A, vitamins is accented, and hence focussed. This intonation might be a suitable reply to the preface "Legumes aren't good for anything, are they?". In fig 1.5 B, good is accented, hence focussed. This pattern might be a suitable retort to "Aren't legumes a lousy source of vitamins?". In fig. 1.5 C, legumes is accented. Preface: "What's a good source of vitamins?".

3.2. Topic segments

In read speech, some phonetic cues are related to the boundaries between large discourse units (Grosz and Hirschberg 1992, Hirschberg and Nakatani 1996, 1998). For instance, a change in topic may be accompanied (marked?) by a big pause and resetting of the speaker's f₀ baseline and topline.

References

Grosz, B. and J. Hirschberg (1992) Some intonational characteristics of discourse structure. In J. J. Ohala, T. M. Nearey, B. L. Derwing, M. M. Hodge and G. E. Wiebe, eds. Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, volume 1. Banff, Canada. 429-432.

Hirschberg, J. and C. Nakatani (1996) A prosodic analysis of discourse segments in direction-giving monologues. Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 286-293.

Hirschberg, J. and C. Nakatani (1998) Acoustic indicators of topic segmentation. In R. H. Mannell and J. Robert-Ribes, eds. Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Sydney, Australia. 976-9.