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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 ...
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.
In more complex types of pitch-accent languages, although there is still only one accent per word, there is a systematic contrast of more than one pitch-contour on the accented syllable, for example, H vs. HL in the Colombian language Barasana, [5] accent 1 vs. accent 2 in Swedish and Norwegian, rising vs. falling tone in Serbo-Croatian, and a ...
The pitch of one's voice can impact the clarity of speech. A monotonous tone of voice can cause the listener to misinterpret information as it is harder to focus to a monotonous tone. [8] A verbose tone of voice highlights technical language that is inwardly focused. A verbose tone of voice is used to convey factual information.
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.
Finally, in the third line, a complicated fall-rise pattern indicates incredulity. Each pitch/intonation pattern communicates a different meaning. [6] An additional pitch-related variation is pitch range; speakers are capable of speaking with a wide range of pitch (this is usually associated with excitement), while at other times with a narrow ...
In many tone languages with downdrift, such as Hausa, the single pipe | may be used to represent a minor prosodic break that does not interrupt the overall decline in pitch of the utterance, while ‖ marks either continuing or final prosody that creates a pitch reset. In such cases, some linguists use only the single pipe, with continuing and ...
Many tone languages have contour tones, which move from one level to another. For example, Mandarin Chinese has four lexical tones. The high tone is level, without contour; the falling tone is a contour from high pitch to low; the rising tone a contour from mid pitch to high, and, when spoken in isolation, the low tone takes on a dipping ...