Perception of tone, intonation and focus Dissertation

Perception of tone, intonation and focus - Dissertation Example The double-articulation theory and any definition of language based upon it leaves a wide margin, for which the name 'prosody' is today a widespread designation. (PhonoMei, 272) Tones, or as some people call them tonemes, have exactly the same function as phonemes: they are distinctive, which means that the speaker, at a certain point in the message, will have to choose between a number of them in order to say just what he wants to say. It is, of course, perfectly immaterial whether the choice is conscious or not. If tones are not considered distinctive features of vocalic phonemes, it is because they are usually found to affect, not a vowel phoneme as such, but a syllabic nucleus, often made up of two or more phonemes or even more than one syllable. Chinese Languages and Intonational Features Of more importance for the history of Chinese is the way in which glottal features can affect vowels: Voiced aspiration, or "murmur," easily spreads from a consonant into an adjacent vowel, and the effects of this have been important in the development of tonal systems in Chinese and Southeast Asian languages. (Chang, 636) The dissimilation between voiced aspiration at the beginning and end of syllables, known as Grassman's Law, that occurred in Sanskrit and Ancient Greek was probably the result of the spreading of the voiced aspiration into the vowel in this way. A quite different kind of glottal activity combined with a vowel is called "creaky voice." It stands between normal voicing and glottal stop in the same way that "murmur," or voiced glottal friction, stands between normal voicing and voiceless glottal friction, or h. In Burmese the so-called "creaky tone" is found in syllables that formerly ended in a glottal stop and still have a weak glottal closure, contrasting to the strong final glottal stop that is derived from method suggested above for indicating the glottal features of obstruents. (Ting, 632) One could suggest'. Creaky sonorants would then be written: a + ?, m + ?, and so on. It is not known whether all languages have this same binary structure for macrosegments. Many reports on different languages pass over the matter of intonation in complete silence. A few specifically state that there are no intonational differences which can be subsumed within the description of the linguistic system, even though there are ups and downs of pitch which seem to be semi-organized culturally, at least to show some correlation with speaker's mood. Since detailed and effective intonational analysis is relatively recent, statements of the kind are not to be trusted; more thorough work with such languages may reveal full-fledged, if simple, intonational systems. If, indeed, there are languages in which no distinctive intonational differences are to be found, then this affords us a typologic criterion. Not all utterances in a language conform neatly to the macrosegment-pause-intonation-remainder scheme. (Tsay, 88) Almost always one is forced to recogn ize that some utterings are broken off before they reach a normal boundary between macrosegments. If a man is shot, or has to sneeze or hiccup, in the middle of a sentence, it is easy enough to regard the linguistically relevant event as having been cut off by an intrusive agent, and to discard the particular event as irrelevant for linguistic analysis. But in the normal