Intonation (definition)

Intonation refers to the pitch patterns of a spoken language and is often characterized as a language's melodic quality. Aside from reflecting the speaker's emotions or intent, intonation is known to offer insight about an utterance's particular syntax. For example, intonation can change as a function of politeness and certainty, and serves syntactic functions like indicating a question (i.e. intonation rises at the end of a phrase to mark a question in English).

See Also

• Prosody (definition)
• Stress (definition)
• Pitch (definition)

External Links

• https://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/cgi-bin/moreabout.pl?tyimuh=intonation
• https://sites.google.com/site/linguisticsportafilio/speech-organs

The link below takes you away from the Gaelic Wiki to Wikipedia. Since wikipedia pages can be edited by anyone, they often contain inaccurate information. So be careful!

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation_(linguistics)

References

• Ladefoged, D. (2010) A Course in Phonetics. 6th Edition. Wadsworth Publishing.