Chapter Summary
In this
chapter we look at some aspects of speech which affect units larger
than a single speech sound. Such suprasegmental features include lexical
stress and we distinguish between primary and secondary stress and, in
variable stress languages, investigate the connection between stress and
word class and syllable weight. In fixed stress languages these
considerations are not an issue because stress regularly falls on the same
syllable with a word.
We also
look at lexical tone which occurs in a large number of the world's
languages. Words in these languages may be distinguished by their pitch
pattern alone. We see that there are two different types of tone language:
contour tone languages where some of the tone patterns are falls in pitch,
or rises in pitch, or sometimes more complex pitch movements. Register tone
languages on the other hand use only tones which have a level pitch
contour. We see that tones, just like vowels and consonants, may have
contextual variants.
Intonation
is the use of pitch variation to aid the interpretation of utterances rather
than to signal word meaning. We see that speech can be divided into
intonational phrases and that the choices available to the speaker in the
placement of IP boundaries may affect how an utterance is interpreted.
Within each IP, the speaker may choose to make certain syllables accented
and the final accent, called the nucleus, is a very important way of
highlighting information that the speaker considers new or significant.
Accented syllables may be associated with pitch contours of different types
and the choice of intonational tone is used both to signal speaker attitude
and to indicate the speaker’s assessment of whether the information in an IP
is new or whether it is already shared knowledge. We also briefly look at
key and its role in organizing speech into topics.
Finally, we
introduce the concept of paralinguistic features such as tempo, pitch range,
loudness, and their role in indicating the speaker’s attitude or mood.