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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 ...
For example, novels with a horror theme can have previously calm, uninvolved individuals coming upon an extreme situation, such as violence involving the supernatural, growing more and more passionate in a way that turns the entire writing increasingly emotional. Official and technical documentation tends to employ a formal tone throughout the ...
Forwards spreading of a tone is also common in some languages. For example, in the Northern Ndebele language of Zimbabwe, the tonal accent on the prefix ú-spreads forward to all the syllables in the word except the last two: úkúhleka "to laugh"; úkúhlékísana "to make one another laugh".
A classic example of a nasal carrying a tone: To form a locative from a noun, one of the possible procedures involves simply suffixing a low tone [ŋ̩] to the noun. To form the locative meaning "on the grass" one suffixes -ng to the word [ʒʷɑŋ̩] jwang ‡ [_ ¯ ], giving jwanng ‡ [_ ¯ _ ] [ʒʷɑŋ̩ŋ̩], with the two last syllabic nasals having contrasting tones.
For example, in This is fun, this is is at pitch 2, and fun starts at level 3 and glides down to level 1. But if the last prominent syllable is not the last syllable of the utterance, the pitch fall-off is a step. For example, in That can be frustrating, That can be has pitch 2, frus-has level 3, and both syllables of -trating have pitch 1. [22]
In some languages of West Africa, for example, an unaccented syllable takes the tone from the closest tone to its left. [5] However, in East and Southeast Asia, "paradigmatic replacement" is a more common form of tone sandhi, as one tone changes to another in a certain environment, whether or not the new tone is already present in the ...
A rising boundary tone can often be heard internally in a sentence in some languages, for example, to mark a topic, [13] to mark off items in a list, or following the subordinate clause in a sentence such as "If you like it, please buy it". [14] (See further: Chichewa tones#Boundary tones.)
Each repetition of "rise" is a semitone higher than the last, making this an especially overt example of word-painting. [7] "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen includes another example of word painting. In the line "It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift, the baffled king composing hallelujah," the lyrics signify ...