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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 ...
A pitch-accent language is a type of language that, when spoken, has certain syllables in words or morphemes that are prominent, as indicated by a distinct contrasting pitch (linguistic tone) rather than by loudness or length, as in some other languages like English.
All vocal languages use pitch pragmatically in intonation—for instance for emphasis, to convey surprise or irony, or to pose a question. Tonal languages such as Chinese and Hausa use intonation in addition to using pitch for distinguishing words. [1] Many writers have attempted to produce a list of distinct functions of intonation.
When pitch prominence is the major factor, the resulting prominence is often called accent rather than stress. [13] There is considerable variation from language to language concerning the role of stress in identifying words or in interpreting grammar and syntax. [14]
Post-lexical pitch accents are assigned to words in phrases according to their context in the sentence and conversation. Within a word, the pitch accent is associated with the syllable marked as metrically strong in the lexicon. Post-lexical pitch accents change not the identity of the word but rather how the word fits into the conversation.
To make things even more confusing, the word "pitch" can be used to describe both tones and pitch accents—Tone (linguistics) starts with this sentence: Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning.
French words are sometimes said to be stressed on the final syllable, but that can be attributed to the prosodic stress, which is placed on the last syllable (unless it is a schwa in which case the stress is placed on the second-last syllable) of any string of words in that language. Thus, it is on the last syllable of a word analyzed in isolation.
The term boundary tone refers to a rise or fall in pitch that occurs in speech at the end of a sentence or other utterance, or, if a sentence is divided into two or more intonational phrases, at the end of each intonational phrase. It can also refer to a low or high intonational tone at the beginning of an utterance or intonational phrase.