INTONATION

INTONATION

Intonation is a crucial element or verbal interaction. Authors of teacher’s handbooks and teaching materials agree on this. The communicative importance of intonation should also be reflected in the attention it gets in language teaching.

There are different ways in which human sound is processed. The idea to emphasis is that all this is done in order to communicate.
Intonation is often defined as a speech melody, consisting of different tones, obviously, what melody and intonation have in common is that in both we make our voice go up or down at will. It means, the tones depend on the pitch of the voice.

There are seven or eight tones but the more commons in English are the follow combinations:”down – up”= falling rising tone and “up – down “= rising – falling.

FALL

RISE

RISE – FALL

FALL – RISE

LEVEL ___

The classic example of intonation is the question-statement distinction. For example, northeastern American English, like very many languages, have a rising intonation for each declarative questions (He found it on the street?), and a falling intonation for wh-questions (Where did he find it?) and statement (He found it on the street.) Yes or no question (Did he find it on the street?) often have a rising end, but not always, For example.

He: ready?

She: No.

He: Why?

She: Problems.

He: Problems?

She: Yes.

He: What?

She: Babysitter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation_(linguistics)
http://webdelprofesor.ula.ve/humanidades/azapata/materias/phonetics_1/intonation_exercises.pd
BY Ivan and Liliana

How to Learn Any Accent

Although we are not required to speak with a certain accent, we might feel inclined towards the one we are most familiar with or the one that we enjoy. In the end, it is a matter of personal choice as long as we are understood by most English speakers.

Actors, singers, and TV / radio announcers are sometimes trained to lose their regional accents or to adopt a different one because they are portraying a period character, or to be understood easily by improving their diction. We, as future English teachers, will also need to be easily understood by students. Not to mention that they will look at us as models of pronunciation and diction.

Amy Walker is a prominent YouTuber that explains some of the basics of how to learn any accent. As she said, we have to become truly fascinated with people and the way they speak in order to learn accents. Even if you are not interested in learning a particular accent, I think her explanation can be useful to develop our diction and confidence with the language.





In the video below you can hear her imitation of various accents from different parts of the world.

Intonation II

Last Monday in my phonetic and phonology class, we saw the an important topic that is intonation, we saw different examples about intonation, we learn that intonation is a very important issue when we talk, we have to do the correct intonation because If we don’t do the correct one we won’t be able to communicated in a proper way, so that we can confuse the listener,

To start I would refresh the definition about intonation, intonation is a variation of pitch while speaking which is not used to distinguish words. (Compare tone.) Intonation and stress are two main elements of linguistic prosody.

All languages use pitch semantically, that is, as intonation, for instance for emphasis, to convey surprise or irony, or to pose a question. Tonal languages such as Chinese and Hausa use pitch to distinguish words in addition to intonation.

Mainly there are two kinds of intonation, the Rising intonation that means the pitch of the voice increases over time, and the falling intonation that means that the pitch decreases with time. A dipping intonation falls and then rises, whereas a peaking intonation rises and then falls.

A very good example taken from northeastern American English, is that it has a rising intonation for echo or declarative questions (He found it on the street?), and a falling intonation for wh- questions (Where did he find it?) and statements (He found it on the street.). Yes or no questions (Did he find it on the street?) often have a rising end, but not always.

I would add how to mark the intonation on a sentece: for the International Phonetic Alphabet, "global" rising and falling intonation are marked with a diagonal arrow rising left-to-right [↗] and falling left-to-right [↘], respectively. These may be written as part of a syllable, or separated with a space when they have a broader scope:

He found it on the street?

[ hiː ˈfaʊnd ɪt | ɒn ðə ↗ˈˈstɹiːt ‖ ]

Here the rising pitch on street indicates that the question hinges on that word, on where he found it, not whether he found it.

Yes, he found it on the street.

[↘ˈjɛs ‖ hi ˈfaʊnd ɪt | ɒn ðə ↘ˈstɹiːt ‖ ]

How did you ever escape?

[↗ˈˈhaʊ dɪdjuː | ˈɛvɚ | ɨ↘ˈˈskeɪp ‖ ]

Here, as is common with wh- questions, there is a rising intonation on the question word, and a falling intonation at the end of the question.

If you want to learn more about english pronunciation please visit:

http://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/intonationexpression.htm