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.