INFORMATION

STUDENT'S NAME : Veronica Michelle Maldonado Torres 

LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS 

e-mail: veromich_1289@hotmail.com

intonation practice

Part I

Instructions. Identify the pitch pattern in the following sentences. Remember that depending on the kind of sentence you have, you can have rising intonation or falling intonation, or a combination of both patterns. 

1. Alicia seems to be a good student, but lately, she has trouble with her assignments.
2. Shall I buy Albert's present in a mall or in a departmente store downtown?
3. Don't tell me that Mr. Parker is indeed a pilot for British Airways?
4. Have you noticed that all the color pencils are on the desk?
5. How many chairs and desks are there in the classroom? Enough for all of us?
6. Who's your twin brother? Allan?
7. The he-dog chased the she-cat all around the garden.
8. Who's calling? Ann or Wilbert?
9. How often do you go to the movies by yourself?
10. Tim always does his homework on time. He's way too punctual.
11. This message was written for you, not for me.
12. Why do you think a dog wags its tail?
13. Seldom do my students use Spanish in class.
14. I can understand Miss McGrady's position, but not Mr. O'Connor's.
15. Could you possibly open the door for the guests?

Note: Don't forget that in a single sentence we should focus on the last content word.

Part II

Homework. To continue practicing pitch patterns, intonation, and sentence stress, work on the following links to assess your understanding.

Practice 1

http://esl.about.com/library/speaking/blpronounce_stress_words1.htm

Practice 2

http://esl.about.com/library/speaking/blpronounce_stress_words2.htm

wave

diagrams

pectrum diagrams

Complex waves can be decomposed into the simpler waves that make them up. We're interested in diagraming the frequencies and the amplitudes of these simpler waves.E.g.,





The simple waves that make up the complex wave are:

Component wave	Frequency	Amplitude
A	100 Hz	30 dB
B	200 Hz	10 dB
C	300 Hz	20 dB

We typically diagram these as vertical lines in a graph where the horizontal position represents the frequency of the simple wave and its height represents the amplitude:

This kind of spectrum diagram is especially convenient for naturally occurring waves, which are typically composed of a lot of simple waves. Two examples:
A flute playing middle C: 
 
A bass clarinet playing an A-sharp (two below middle C): 
 
(Sounds and plots for the musical instruments come from Geoffrey Sandell's SHARC Timbre database at Loyola University Chicago.)
Don't confuse these spectrum diagrams with spectrograms (which we'll cover later).

COMBINING WAVES

Sound waves

Sound is caused by small areas of high and low pressure progragating outward from the source.
One convenient way to diagram a sound wave is to graph the pressure at each point in time, the way it might be picked up by a microphone for example:

This simplest kind of pressure wave is called a sine wave. Interesting things to measure for a sine wave:

1. amplitude (or loudness, size of pressure differences)
   usually measured in decibels (dB)
2. wavelength
3. frequency (or pitch)
   usually measured in cycles per second, or Hertz (Hz)

Frequency and amplitude are independent of each other. Two sine waves may have the same frequency and different amplitudes, and vice versa.
Wavelength is the converse of frequency: the shorter the wavelength, the higher the frequency; the longer the wavelength, the lower the frequency. (Sound will move at the same speed, about 330 metres per second. So if you want to double the frequency of a wave, you'll have to fit twice as many wavelengths into that 330 metres, and each wavelength will have to half as long.)

Combining waves

If you're listening to waves from two sources at the same time:

• a high pressure from one will cancel out a low pressure from the other
• two high pressures will reinforce each other
• two low pressures will reinforce each other

You can get the overall effect by adding the waves' pressures together at each point in time. (You have to treat the normal air pressure as zero, so that a higher pressure is positive and a lower pressure is negative.) 
The two red waves added together produce the blue wave. At the first green line, both red waves have high pressure and reinforce each other to give an extra high pressure in the blue wave. At the second green line, the two red waves have opposite pressures and cancel each other out.
The following two sounds have frequencies of 300 Hz and 500 Hz:
 300 Hz 

 500 Hz

They can be added together:

to produce a complex wave:
 
This is important because:
Any complex wave can be treated as a combination of simple sine waves.
We usually don't care about the actual complex wave itself. We're only interested in the frequencies and amplitudes of the simple waves that it's made up of. Two more examples:
 300 Hz and 2000 Hz added
 900 Hz and 1100 Hz

Comparison with light

We see simple light waves (with only one frequency) as one of the colours of the rainbow. Combining together two or more simple one-frequency sine waves produces more complex colours. The more frequencies you add, the whiter the colour gets. With light, you can easily separate the frequencies by shining the complex light wave through a prism.
The set of frequencies in light wave (as separated by a prism) is called its spectrum.
Scientists can identify different substances by looking at the spectrum of the light the substances emit when they're heated. Iron will glow with a different set of frequencies than nickel or sulphur.
The situation is similar with sound. The complex wave for an [i] will be composed of a different set of frequencies than the complex wave for [a].
We need a way to separate a complex sound wave out into its component frequencies (and their amplitudes) so that we can see what makes vowels different. A spectrograph is essentially just a prism for sound. 

INTONATION

Intonation

Intonation contours in English

Not all rises and falls in pitch that occur in the course of an English phrase can be attributed to stress. The same set of segments and word stresses can occur with a number of pitch patterns.Consider the difference between:

• You're going. (statement)
• You're going? (question)

The rise and fall of pitch throughout is called its intonation contour.English has a number of intonation patterns which add conventionalized meanings to the utterance: question, statement, surprise, disbelief, sarcasm, teasing.
An important feature of English intonation is the use of an intonational accent (and extra stress) to mark the focus of a sentence. Normally this focus accent goes on the last major word of the sentence, but it can come earlier in order to emphasize one of the earlier words or to contrast it with something else.

Cross-linguistic differences

People have a tendency to think of intonation as being directly linked to the speaker's emotions. In fact, the meaning of intonation contours is as conventionalized as any other aspect of language. Different languages can use different conventions, giving rise to the potential for cross-cultural misunderstandings.Two examples of cross-linguistic differences in intonation patterns:

Contrastive emphasis

Many languages mark contrastive emphasis like English, using an intonational accent and additional stress.Many other languages use only syntactic devices for contrastive emphasis, for example, moving the emphasized phrase to the beginning of the sentence.

• Instead of
  • I want a car for my birthday. (as opposed to a bike)
• you would have to say something like:
  • A car I want for my birthday.
  • It's a car that I want for my birthday.

Listeners who speak the second type of language will not necessarily interpret extra pitch and volume as marking emphasis. Listeners who don't speak the second type of language will not necessarily interpret a different word order as marking emphasis (as opposed to assuming that the speaker doesn't know basic grammar).

Questions

The normal intonation contours for questions in English use:

• final rising pitch for a Yes/No question
  • Are you coming today?
• final falling pitch for a Wh-question
  • When are you coming? Where are you going?

Using a different pattern typically adds something extra to the question. E.g., falling intonation on a Yes/No question can be interpreted as abruptness. Rising intonation on a Wh-question can imply surprise or that you didn't hear the answer the first time and are asking to have it repeated.These patterns too can be different across languages. Even small differences can be important:

reading the one language with the intonation pattern appropriate to the other can give rise to entirely unintentional effects: English with Russian intonation sounds unfriendly, rude or threatening, to the native speaker of English; Russian with an English intonation sounds affected or hypocritical to the native speaker of Russian.
Comrie (1984); "Interrogativity in Russian"

INTONATION

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