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In phonetics, contour describes speech sounds that behave as single segments but make an internal transition from one quality, place, or manner to another. Such sounds may be tones, vowels, or consonants. 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 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 tone contour or contour tone is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East Asia , Southeast Asia , West Africa , Nilo-Saharan languages , Khoisan languages , Oto-Manguean languages and some languages of South America .
Tones are linked to stressed syllables: an asterisk is used to indicate a tone that must be aligned with a stressed syllable. In addition, there are phrasal accents which signal the pitch at the end of an intermediate phrase (e.g. H − and L − ), and boundary tones at full phrase boundaries (e.g. H% and L%).
The rhetorical modes (also known as modes of discourse) are a broad traditional classification of the major kinds of formal and academic writing (including speech-writing) by their rhetorical (persuasive) purpose: narration, description, exposition, and argumentation.
The vowel that follows /h/ in the word-initial syllable often carries a low or low rising tone. In rapid speech, that can be the only trace of the deleted /h/. Potentially minimal tonal pairs are thus created, like oh (neutral [ʌʊ˧] or high falling [ʌʊ˦˥˩]) vs. hoe (low [ʌʊ˨] or low rising [ʌʊ˩˨]). [95]
In linguistics, speech synthesis, and music, the pitch contour of a sound is a function or curve that tracks the perceived pitch of the sound over time. Pitch contour may include multiple sounds utilizing many pitches, and can relate the frequency function at one point in time to the frequency function at a later point.
Tone should always be included in the transcriptions of tonal languages. Because tone numbers are ambiguous—the reader may not know whether [ma4] is supposed to be high tone, low tone, or a tone number, for example—IPA transcriptions should use diacritic marks ([má]) or tone letters ([ma˦]), unless the article explains the numbering system.