It's not what you said. It's how you said it.

Intonation provides speech with an amazing degree of expressiveness. We often hear people say ‘it’s not what you said, it’s how you said it’ – intonation allows us to detect sarcasm, helps us to read one’s true intentions and is therefore a crucial element of communication even if hidden beneath a layer of words and phrases. We have pitch, volume and speed as ingredients, and rhythm and pauses as spices for every sentence that comes out of our mouths. These are the auditory properties of sound which don’t show in writing so to express them linguists invented a special transcription.

Transcription

There are two categories of intonational transcription, analogically to the broad and narrow segmental phonology transcriptions. A broad transcription represents phonological analysis of the speaker’s pitch and in a tonetic-stress marking system a mark is normally placed before the stressed syllable. A narrow transcription on the other hand is represented by a varying series of dots, sometimes a line that corresponds with speaker’s pitch of voice – top and bottom lines represent the pitch range. Each dot on the diagram stands for one syllable where big dots are stressed syllables. This type of transcription is referred to as interlinear tonetic.

Loudness – a nightmare for non-native English speakers

Loudness as a prosodic feature is to do with the stress pattern of a word and can often bring about a change of meaning e.g. record (verb) – record (noun). If you ever heard me speak you would know that I’m not a native speaker of English judging by my mixed up stress pattern. This seems to be a huge obstacle for many speakers of English as a foreign language and is indeed a measure of super fluency. Loudness depends on intensity of energy occurring in a sound and this in turn is related to the pressure of the air coming out of our lungs. What makes it trickier is that in English there are certain influences on intensity and loudness such as with open vowels which always are of greater intensity than close vowels. This, of course, comes naturally for native English speakers whereas foreigners need to adapt to their system.

Functions of intonation

The most obvious role of intonation is of course to express our emotions and attitudes i.e. happiness, sadness, impatience, anger, surprise and practically everything we can think of. Its grammatical function is to help us read whether what somebody said was a question, exclamation or perhaps just a statement. In this case it is a substitute for punctuation. Sometimes intonation can help us achieve our goals, especially if these involve public speaking. Charismatic masters of prosody have a much easier time convincing people or sometimes even manipulating them. In this group we can normally find politicians, preachers, teachers, religious leaders, lawyers and many more.

Guide to Style Guides

Some of the better quality newspapers such as The Guardian and The Times provide style guides for the benefit of their journalists. The idea being that all the articles appearing in their publications should be consistent in terms of punctuation, spelling, capitalisation and use of language. The guides are usually made available to the public in book form and/or on the internet, such as The Times style book. If you’re into this sort of thing it can make for fascinating reading.

Image: Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Usually the style guide writers also advise on topical issues, such as how to spell Colonel Gaddafi’s surname out of the 32 or more possible options (strictly speaking it’s an alliteration of his name from the Libyan original).

Apart from useful guidance on where to place hyphens and suchlike the style guides often provide a list of “banned words”. This isn't often, contrary to what you might expect, a list of swear words and terms. Instead, it is something that the guardians of good writing practice find far more heinous, namely clichés, tautolgies and sensationalisms such as

Brutal murders - all murders are brutal so that word isn’t needed
Innocent victims - victims are by their very nature innocent
Jaw-dropping

The tone of these style guides can be quite amusing. For example, Americanisms are frowned upon and and so are seemingly politically correct terms such as chairperson. The word “toilet” is on the banned list too, this obviously has lower-class connotations, despite it being the word that you will see on the door of public toilets.

So, the higher quality press has style guides that aspire to keeping their journalistic standards high. Do the gutter press have style guides encouraging sensational headlines, stereotyping and stating the obvious. Do men's magazines provide guidance to their journalists on how to objectify women, relate their tales of excessive drinking and the best way to describe bodily functions. Maybe they do, but somehow I think these are the sort of guides less likely to be made available to the public.

Defending the Queen's English

What is it about American phrases and spellings that some Britons find so offensive?

Extremists (loyalists even?) might refer to British English as “The Queen’s English”.

You lazy Americans are distorting the language and thereby insulting the Queen. Our Queen! Treason! Off with their heads!

Why lazy? Does it really take all that extra effort to type the u in “colour”. Having said that, the addition of that letter u does little to help some of my countrymen pronounce the word correctly. All too often you will hear “culler”, which has an entirely different meaning.

There are occasions when British spellings win out. Take for example “meter” (a measuring device) and “metre” (a unit of distance). Here there is a useful distinction in spelling what are two essentially different, but related, words. Hang on, maybe it’s not so useful after all. Americans favour imperial measurements just as much as the British and will rarely measure distance in metres anyway (aside from the fact that the context will usually tell you what sort of meter we are talking about). The only difference being that the British occasionally get forced to use the metric system by those nasty bureaucrats in Brussels.

Other British objections to Americanisms are also arbitarily unreasonable . Take these two examples that follow a similar structure

Write me (surely that should be write to me?)
Call me (this is acceptable and call to me is a mistake you’ll often hear non-native English speakers make)

The differences between American and British English are relatively few considering the number of words in the English language. There are the obvious choices between words such as “sidewalk” and “pavement” or “elevator” and “lift”. American pronunciation is an area that causes a certain amount of consternation for me. Do I pronounce “schedule” as skedule or shedule? I honestly don’t know any more. I really do watch too many American films and sitcoms.

This is where the American z (zee to Americans, zed to everyone else) can come in useful.

Initializing (American spelling, the letter in pronounced as a z)
Initialising (British spelling, pronounced as a z, but written s, pure crazineness!)

Let’s not get carried away with this useful aid to pronunciation, otherwise it could have far-reaching rezults.

From reading the article so far you might think I am more in favo(u)r of American English than British English. Perhaps, but right now I’m in the United Kingdom, drinking tea and complaining about the weather and advocating the use of British English, original and best!

Rhetorically Speaking 3: Irony

In Search of Irony

A couple of books I’m reading at the moment have made references to “ironic t-shirts”. This got me to thinking, what exactly is an ironic t-shirt and for that matter, what exactly is irony.

It turns out that there are three main types of irony...

Verbal Irony

This is when you say something while implying something else. For example if there's a massive rainstorm outside and you say “What lovely weather we’re having!”. You are being ironic.

Dramatic Irony

When the readers or viewers are aware of a character’s situation and the characters themselves aren’t this is dramatic irony. In “Romeo and Juliet”, for example, Romeo is distraught because he thinks that Juliet is dead. He then kills himself. We as readers know that Juliet is not in fact dead, so that’s dramatic irony.

Situational Irony

Ah, my favourite type of irony. This is when a situation leads to results that would not normally be expected. Classic example

President Reagan was struck by a bullet that bounced off the presidential car. This is ironic because the car was bullet-proof (and probably bomb and missile proof too) and in normal circumstances would protect the president from bullets.

Irony in Popular Culture

In my quest for examples of irony I was led to popular culture and this sketch from Blackadder

Blackadder: Baldrick, have you no idea what irony is?
Baldrick: Yes, it's like goldy and bronzy only it's made out of iron.

Ok, this was just a simple play on words, but amusing nevertheless.

Apparently Americans “just don’t get irony”. Does this extend to Canadians too? Perhaps. You would think that Alanis Morissette’s song “Ironic” would be a great place to find some ironic scenarios. You’d be wrong. As Matt Sturge points out in this article most of what she mentions in the song is just bad luck/unfortunate timing:

Attempts at describing irony: 11
Successful attempts: 2.5

Irish comedian Ed Byrne showed he really knows what irony is all about: "The only ironic thing about that song is it's called 'Ironic' and it's written by a woman who doesn't know what irony is. That's quite ironic."

Anyway, back to those elusive ironic t-shirts. Ordinary t-shirts may turn out to be ironic if worn in the right situation. Take for example these ironic t-shirts to get arrested in. Strictly speaking artistic irony is when an artistic work refers back to earlier art.

My search for ironic t-shirts led me to this design, "Pop Art is Dead". Maybe this is the ultimate in ironic t-shirt design? The t-shirt is ironic in the artistic sense (referring to the pop art style) and situationally ironic (because it’s using pop art imagery while at the same time saying it’s dead). So it seems that not only is pop art still very much alive, but irony is helping to keep it that way.

Types of comma, and rules surrounding them

The isolating/bracketing commas:

The most common type of commas and they are used to show a weak interruption in the sentence, something we could put in brackets hence the name. They usually occur in pairs although sometimes one of them won’t show.

He was, I thought at the time, a decent enough person.
I never realised, however, how much effort it will take to go to University.
Alfred Charles Gimson, born in 1917, was an English phonetician.

The easiest way to check whether you need commas is to imagine a given sentence without the interruption you’re trying to mark. If it still makes sense – commas should be there e.g. He was a decent enough person is still a sentence even after removing I thought at the time.

A listing comma:

It can be replaced by and or or:

I like eating bananas, watermelons and kiwis. / I like eating bananas and watermelons and kiwis.
I will go to Italy, Spain or Portugal. / I will go to Italy or Spain or Portugal.

A joining comma:

It is used to join two complete sentences into one and is always followed by and, or, but, while and yet.

I went to college, and my husband did as well.
I must have forgotten about my homework, or there was no homework at all.
I loved him, but he turned out to be a psychopath.
She was a good and loyal person, while his new girlfriend is a lying cheat.
The train was running, yet I felt I was stuck in the same place.

A gapping comma:

It is used when omitting words already used in a sentence in order to avoid repetition.

I dyed my hair black, and my sister, red.

Bear in mind the comma before and is a joining comma, whereas the one before red is a gapping comma (used instead of repeating has dyed her hair).

Step by step grammar 5: Adverbs

An adverb is a word that we use when describing a verb. It usually ends in –ly and answers the questions: how? (quickly, carefully) When? (recently) How often? (regularly, weekly) . Most adverbs are formed by simply adding the aforementioned –ly to the end of an adjective e.g. slow – slowly, patient – patiently, smooth – smoothly etc., however, there are exceptions too e.g. good – well, fast – fast.

We said that an adverb describes a verb. Look at the following examples:

I walked slowly. – slowly describes the verb walked – how did I walk/in what manner did I walk? Slowly.
I recently purchased a new vehicle. – When did I purchase that new vehicle? Recently.
I frequently exercise. – How often do I exercise? Frequently.

I hope this was easy. If you haven’t subscribed to www.englishfocused.com yet do it now as there’s more to come. Next Wednesday we will explain what a preposition is.

I are Hulk, I has no grammar

Some people tend to think that knowledge of vocabulary is key to being able to speak a foreign language and that grammar is of less importance. Let me tell you that this isn’t true. We use grammar in everyday speech, whether we want to or not.  If meaning were to be contained within just the word, then we should be able to understand the following utterance without fail:

SPOT

Well, we don’t understand it at all, do we? The problem occurs because there is a number of possibilities and every one of us can understand it in a different way.

A spot as a small part of different colour than the main part? A spot as a place? A spot as a small quantity?

We can’t possibly guess which sense is implied without any context given. But linguistically, giving context is giving a sentence and to give a sentence we need grammar.

There was a little black spot on my yellow summer dress. This nightclub we went to turned out to be quite a hot spot! Would you like a spot of tea?

With sentences everything becomes clearer. That means, with grammar everything becomes clearer. We are able to make sense!

We need to study grammar which is by no means of less value than other domain of knowledge, however, it is unfairly looked upon. Language is involved with everything humans do and to understand language is to understand grammar, the very basis of it. With no grammar, language would be like a house with no foundations. No other species has this incredible skill and ability to speak yet we, so often, carelessly neglect it. Furthermore, a first to understanding a foreign language is knowing the grammar of your mother tongue. You will find, that other languages have nouns, verbs and adjectives too and without knowing these terms it’s much harder to understand new linguistic concepts.

There is a significant difference between knowing grammar and knowing about grammar. We all ‘know’ grammar - you understand what I’m saying and you can express what you want to say too. If you are a native English speaker, then you have learnt this grammar unconsciously whereas if you studied English as a foreign language then you not only know its grammar but you probably know about it too. Hence no surprise the latter often know a lot more about the English grammar than the former. If never taught to do so, it is incredibly difficult to explain the grammatical terms and processes as they are plainly abstract ideas. And at the same time - it is just as difficult to understand them.

I used to get really frustrated with people who asked me about Polish and its grammar without having the slightest clue of how their own language works in the first place. They just seem to think there really is a magical pill I can give them so that they will suddenly grasp all of it. Once I started using terminology that is absolutely a must-know when discussing language and which they obviously failed to understand, they would look at me as if I lost my ability to speak at all and was making inarticulate noises instead. Argh! Then of course they’d say I’m showing off. Really awkward and really frustrating. Don’t do that to foreigners! Make a bit of effort instead. Websites such as English Focused are here to help you out. Have a look at our Step By Step Grammar Series, a painless walk through those seemingly difficult grammatical terms. Good luck!