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1. Intonation enables us to express emotion and attitude as we speak, and this adds a special kind of “meaning” to spoken language. This is often called the attitudinal function of intonation.
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intonation function
2. Intonation help to produce the effect of prominence on syllables that need to be perceived as stressed and in particular the placing of tonic stress on a particular syllable marks out the words to which is belongs to the most important in the tone-unit. This has been called the accentual function of intonation
3. The listener is better able to recognize the grammar and syntactic structure of what being said by using the information contained in the intonation, for example: such things as the placement of boundaries between phrases and clauses and sentences, difference between questions and statements and the use of grammatical subordination may be indicated. This has been called the grammatical function of intonation
4. Looking at the act of speaking in a broader way, we can see that the intonation can signal to the listener what is to be taken as “new” information and what is already “given” can suggest when the speaker is indicating some sorts of contrast or link with material in another tone-unit and, in conversation, can convey to the listener what kind of respond is expected. Such functions are examples of information’s disclosure function.
Typical feature of intonation
1. Intonation is significant, the utterance with different pitch patterns mean different things, example: they are coming = announcement
2. Intonation is systematic: we don’t event the tunes as we go along. There is limited number of pitch patterns (tune), one we use them to produce definite meaningful effects. It is therefore possible to describe tunes and give rules for their use.
3. Intonation is characteristic: The tunes of English are not necessary the same in form and in use as those of other languages.