Tone and Word Choice

3 Key excerpts on "Tone and Word Choice"

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  Best Words, Best Order

  Essays on Poetry

  • S. Dobyns(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  A word's connotative meaning includes its secondary meanings as well as its symbolic and cultural dimensions. Bread is the staff of life as well as a word for money. Intonation is the emotional 152 I Best Words, Best Order shading given by the word's stress and pronunciation. It also indicates whether the sentence is interrogative, declarative or exclamatory. In a piece of writing, such as a poem, intonation must be inferred from the context and/or from mechanical or formal devices such as typeface, punctuation marks, line breaks, meter, rhyme, the onomatopoeic values of sound and pitch and so on. It is through a piece of writing's intonation that we discover the intention of the writer. Tone controls how we read a word's denotative and connotative values. Tone is one of four general linguistic qualities making up a poem's form. The others are the relation between stressed and unstressed syllables; the aural qualities of language, that is varieties of rhyme, alliteration, vowel pitch, consonant quality and so on; and third, pacing, which is controlled variations in the forward momentum of the poem. Of these four qualities, tone is the most difficult to analyze because it is intangible. Like a person's emotional mood, it cannot be precisely measured. Yet if we do not correctly recognize the poem's tone, then we will be unable to discover its meaning and consequently its intention. Further, the tone of the poem and the tone of the speaker of the poem may be different, as in T. S. Eliot's ''The Love Song of). Alfred Prufrock" or Robert Browning's 'To His Last Duchess." Of these four qualities that make up a poem's form, we can say that tone is the way in which the manner of the telling is included in what is told; the manner of telling becomes part of the subject matter.

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  The Sounds of Language

  An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology

  • Elizabeth C. Zsiga(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  The Sounds of Language: An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology, First Edition. Elizabeth C. Zsiga. © 2013 Elizabeth C. Zsiga. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. A shocking number of people concerned with African languages still seem to think of tone as a species of esoteric, inscrutable, and utterly unfortunate accretion characteristic of underprivileged languages – a sort of cancerous malignancy afflicting an otherwise normal linguistic organism. Since there is thought to be no cure – or even reliable diagnosis – for the regrettable malady, the usual treatment is to ignore it, in hope that it will go away of itself. William Welmers, African Language Structures, 1973, p. 73 Chapter outline 17.1 Tone 376 17.1.1 Tone contrasts 376 17.1.2 Tonal representations 380 17.1.3 Tone alternations: the evidence from Africa and the Americas 383 17.1.4 Tone alternations: the evidence from Asia 388 17.2. Intonation 392 17.2.1 What is intonation? 392 17.2.2 Intonational representations 393 Chapter summary 397 Further reading 397 Review exercises 398 Further analysis and discussion 399 Further research 399 Go online 400 References 400 17 Tone and Intonation 376 TONE AND INTONATION Linguistic tone is not, in fact, going to go away. As was noted in Chapter 4, it is the major Indo-European languages that are exceptional in not having tone, rather than the other way around, and the student of phonology cannot afford to ignore the role of tonal contrast and alternation in thousands of languages around the world. However, as Welmers goes on to say, The presence of tone need not cause us to tremble in our scientific boots. . . . [T]he varie- ties and functions of tonal contrasts in language are of the same order as the varieties and functions of any other contrasts; the problems of tonal analysis are simply typical problems of linguistic analysis. This chapter follows up on Welmers’ assertion by discussing tone as a phonological system.

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  The First Glot International State-of-the-Article Book

  The Latest in Linguistics

  • Lisa Cheng, Rint Sybesma, Lisa Cheng, Rint Sybesma(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Traditionally, tone refers to the pitch contour of a syllable or a word, and intonation refers to the pitch contour of a phrase or an utterance. But as Goldsmith (1981) pointed out, intonation in English consists of a sequence of word tones, similar to what one finds in a tone language. In addition, tonal behavior in English is similar to that in other tone languages. For example, when the word tone (M)HL falls on 'Japan', we get M-HL, where HL on the second syllable is realized as a fall; this is what one finds in tone languages (see below). We have seen, then, that tone and intonation display certain similarities. This point will recur in the rest of this article. 2. Developments in the past 30 years In early works of generative phonology (1950s and 1960s), there was very little mention of tone. This is probably because a main issue then was distinctive features, and tone did not seem to fit in easily. In particular, distinctive features work well for the representation of segments, but tone has traditionally been thought to be a suprasegmental property, a property that belongs to units larger than the segment (e.g. Pike 1948; Firth 1957). Another difficulty is that some tones seem to require trajecto-ry features, such as rise or fall, whereas regular segmental features are all static, such as [round] or [voice], but not [increasing round] or [dimin-ishing voice]. The lack of discussion on tone or intonation left a striking gap in the monumental Sound pattern of English (SPE see Chomsky & Halle 1968, p. 329). Wang (1967) made the first serious attempt to represent tone with distinc-tive features. He posited seven binary features to represent all tones. However, out of the seven features, four were trajectory features: [contour], [rise], [fall], and [convex]. In addition, with seven features many possible tones are predicted, of which only 13 were actually found. Perhaps because of this, Wang's work was not quickly adopted by other generative phonologists.

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