introduction

Intonation is best seen, in my opinion, as reflecting three types of decision that speakers repeatedly make as they speak. They are how to break up the material (chunking, the signalling of syntactic boundaries); what tones to use (e.g. fall vs. rise, signalling certain grammatical functions as well as such things as the speaker’s attitude to what they are saying); and where to place sentence accents (particularly nuclear accents, mainly used to signal focus). We call these systems tonality, tone and tonicity respectively. Informally, they are the three Ts.

1. I don’t know. (one IP)

2. I don’t, | no. (two IPs)

Where it is relevant, I show IP boundaries with the mark ‘|’, as in example (2).

Clearly, tone varies wildly across languages and dialects, at least at the superficial level. The question is what underlying regularities there may be. We can dismiss obviously untrue claims such as that statements always have a fall, while questions always have a rise. (Just think of Belfast and the west of Scotland.) But there are other candidates for the status of universal that are worth considering. How general is it that, as in English, wh-questions tend to have the same pattern as statements, while yes-no questions are different? Pretty widespread, I think.