CHAPTER OUTLINE

In this chapter you will learn about: the use of fundamental frequency; the difference between lexical stress and rhythmic stress; lexical stress types, including fixed stress and variable stress; lexical tone languages, including contour tone and register tone languages; intonation and its role in determining the interpretation of utterances; paralinguistic features and their use in signalling speaker attitude.

KEY TERMS

1. Accent

2. Contour tone

3. Fixed stress

4. Fundamental frequency

5. Intonation

6. Key

7. Lexical tone

8. Nuclear tone

9. Nucleus

10. Paralinguistic features

11. Pitch

12. Register tone

13. Rhythm

14. Stress, primary and secondary

15. Variable stress

Introduction

We have looked in some detail at how speech sounds are produced, how they may influence each other and how they are organised into syllables. However, speech is not just a string of speech sounds. There are features of speech that span a number of speech sounds or a number of syllables or even whole utterances. Such features are called suprasegmental or prosodic features. They include lexical and rhythmic stress, lexical tone and intonation. In this chapter we will deal with variation in fundamental frequency and pitch and see how pitch variation is used in language to signal the difference between the meanings of words in lexical tone languages and how pitch is connected with lexical stress. Pitch variation is also very important at the level of the utterance. Intonation is used to signal how a speaker intends his or her utterances to be interpreted.

Fundamental frequency and pitch

We saw in Chapter 2 that the vocal folds can vibrate at different rates.