PREFACE

In a way this is simply another book about English suprasegmentals, and the somewhat grandiose title was chosen in part because all the other obvious titles for treatments of English suprasegmentals have already been used. I came to study intonation because I was interested in its role in connecting sentences in discourse, and like many another linguist, I assumed that the problem of a notation to represent intonational form was a relatively “trivial” one, which could be disposed of quickly on the way to studying “interesting” questions of intonational function. But I soon realized that even establishing a simple taxonomy on which to base a notation was a formidable task, one on which there was little agreement. Like the blind sages studying the elephant, investigators of intonation had found snakes and ropes and tree trunks; increasingly I found myself interested in the question of why descriptions of intonation vary as much as they do.

More importantly, then, the title focuses on what it is about intonation that has led generations of careful researchers to produce such different descriptions of the same beast. Linguists, in general, have simply assumed that intonational meaning is somehow different from other linguistic meaning, which has given them license to mix the ordinary and the extraordinary in their analyses in unpredictable proportions. I would not disagree with the premise that intonational meaning is different, but I think it is important to consider just how it differs and how it does not. Treating that question, rather than analyzing English intonation, is the most important aim of this work. While it is true that I have largely restricted the discussion to English, I believe that the characteristics of intonational meaning identified here are generalizable—mutatis mutandis—to other Ianguages as well.

The book is thus not a complete analysis of English intonation. It only lays the foundation for such an analysis; much detail remains to be filled in. It might be better characterized as an introduction to the study of intonation. Even at that, some familiarity with past work and important issues is assumed throughout, but wherever possible I have summarized and synopsized the writers whose work I discuss. Perhaps the book is best described as an investigation of what has been said about intonation, and what it proves about the way intonation affects the meaning of what we say. This is, I hope, a matter of interest to any linguist, not just a specialist on intonation.

In my use of technical terminology, I have been as consistent and as conservative as possible. Because of the broad range of conflicting approaches to the general subject, however, the goals of consistency and conservatism are not always compatible, and a few preliminary remarks are in order on my use of the most general terms. I argue for a distinction between stress and accent akin to that made by Bolinger—’stress’ at word level, ‘accent’ at phrase or sentence level—but in many cases where no ambiguity seemed to arise I have loosely used ‘stress’ to refer to phenomena of syllable prominence in general. (For example, I have made much use of the traditional American term ‘sentence stress’, even though by Bölingens definition—and mine—it is accent, not stress.) Where I specifically needed a general term to cover both stress and accent, I have used prominence. In the same way, I also argue for the traditional distinction between ‘stress’ and ‘pitch’, and have in many cases used intonation (or ‘intonation proper’) to distinguish pitch phenomena from prominence. Again, however, I have often loosely used ‘intonation’—as in the title itself—to refer to prosodie features in general. Where I needed an explicit cover-term to distinguish all phenomena of intonation, prominence, etc., from segmentals, I have used supra-segmentals, but I disown any theoretical baggage that may come along with that term.

As a notational convention I have adopted Bolinger’s use of squiggly lines of type, in which the ups and downs roughly indicate the melody of the voice,

Since any notation system other than such a purely iconic one does presuppose an analysis, I have thought it best to avoid the well-known systems developed by Pike, Trager and Smith, and the British pedagogical tradition. The latter two are illustrated in Chapter 1, however, and in Chapter 7 I do make some limited use of the British ‘tonetic’ marks for the sake of typographical simplicity, once the analysis is established.