Intonation: The Meaning of Linguistic Tunes

Catalog description

Intonation is the melody of speech: how a speaker's pitch changes over the course of an utterance, along with the placement of emphasis, or sentence-level stress. Intonation and stress contribute to the interpretation of utterances in multiple ways. For example, the questions "Did BOB go to the store?" and "Did Bob go to the STORE?" contain the same words, but request different information. Similarly, whether the sentence "Bob went to the store" is interpreted as a statement or as a question, and whether as expressing certainty or uncertainty on the part of the speaker, depends on its intonation. Features of intonation can also convey information about the speaker's attitudes and affect: sarcasm and irony, for example, may be signaled by intonation. The goal of this course is two-fold. First, students will learn about the phonetic correlates of intonation and stress, and learn how to analyze intonation as a system of high and low tones, using the intonation transcription system ToBI. This will enable students to accurately describe the intonation pattern of an utterance. Second, students will learn how intonation is used to convey semantic and pragmatic information. The course will focus primarily on English, but other languages will be explored to serve as a basis of comparison. The course will be of interest to students interested in learning some of the intricacies of face-to-face linguistic communication. Students in the departments of English, Modern Languages, Language Technology, Human-Computer Interaction, and Psychology will find material relevant to their major topics. The course serves as an elective for the Linguistics Major, and is a natural companion to other courses on the expression of linguistic meaning: Meaning in Language, Language in Use, and Syntax and Discourse. The course requires a basic background in phonetics. Prerequisites: 85-385 or 80-283…