This was the first textbook on intonation for linguists and the first textbook which attempted to widen the discussion of intonation to include languages other than English. There have been a number of excellent textbooks which have been pedagogically oriented to the needs of speakers of English as a second or foreign language (see in particular Palmer, 1922; Armstrong and Ward, 1926; Kingdon, 1958a; O'Connor and Arnold, 1961 and 1973; Halliday, 1970; and Pike, 1945, as the sole American book of this sort). Such textbooks have all included at least some (and often a large amount of) practice material. The present book is not intended as a practice book; those whose ears and mouths need to practise the skill of recognising and producing intonation patterns should use one of the above books, preferably one which uses the same tonetic-stress marks as the present book (e.g. O'Connor and Arnold, 1973). Among previous books on intonation the nearest approaches to the present volume are Bolinger (1972b), Crystal (1969a), Ladd (1980), and Couper- Kuhlen (1986). Bolinger (1972b) is a book of readings with the selective coverage which that entails; Crystal (1969a) is the most thorough bibliographic survey in print, but covers essentially only English; Ladd (1980) gets to grips with many of the difficult theoretical problems in intonational analysis, but is nevertheless selective and also limited to English; while Couper-Kuhlen (1986) thoroughly surveys a wide range of work on intonation, but is yet again limited to English.

Stress and accent

In chapter 1 the articulatory and acoustic correlates of the perceived phonetic features of pitch, length, and loudness were discussed. The justification for concentrating on these three features was that they are all used to make some syllables more prominent in words and in sentences. Perceptual experiments have clearly shown that, in English at any rate, the three features form a scale of importance in bringing syllables into prominence, pitch being the most efficacious, and loudness the least so. The importance of length varies in fact across languages, depending on whether a language uses length for phonemic contrasts on the segmental level; if it does, then loudness will take over from length as the second most important indicator of prominence.

The terms ‘stress’ and ‘accent’ were also introduced in chapter 1, although no systematic difference was made in the use of the three terms ‘prominence', ‘stress’ and ‘accent'. In the past the word ‘stress’ has been used in different and confusing ways. It has sometimes been used simply to refer to syllables (or vowels) made prominent for linguistic purposes, either in words or in sentences. But stress has also often been used to mean ‘breath-force or loudness’ the implication being that this is the principal means whereby syllables are made prominent. This second type of usage is misguided since, as indicated in the last paragraph, loudness generally plays a minor role in producing prominences.