Research on intonation has long been characterised by a number of unresolved basic issues and fundamental differences of approach. For many years, these precluded the emergence of any widely accepted framework for the description of intonational phenomena, or even any general agreement on what the interesting phenomena are. Since the mid 1970s, however, several lines of research have converged on a set of broadly shared assumptions and methods, and studies on a variety of languages are now yielding new discoveries expressed in comparable terms. This emerging viewpoint – which it is perhaps only slightly premature to characterise as the standard theory of intonational structure – is the subject of this book.

As the book's title suggests, the heart of this theory is the idea that intonation has a phonological organisation. This idea requires some justification, since intonation sits uneasily with many ordinary linguistic assumptions. For one thing, it is closely linked to a paralinguistic vocal code: sometimes against our will, pitch and voice quality help signal information about our sex, our age, and our emotional state, as part of a parallel communicative channel that can be interpreted by listeners (even some non-human ones) who do not understand the linguistic message. Yet we know that in languages like Chinese or Thai or Yoruba it is also fairly simple to identify a small inventory of phonological elements – tones – that are phonetically based on pitch or voice quality but are otherwise quite analogous to segmental phonemes, and that these tones function alongside the more universal paralinguistic effects of pitch and voice quality.