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Intonation and meaning.

General.

It has often been pointed out, and rightly, that no tone group is used exclusively with this or that sentence type – question, statement and the like – and also that no sentence type always requires the use of one and only one tone group. As a concrete example it would be quite untrue to say that sentences having the form of a question are always said with Tone Group VII. Certainly the learning of English intonation would be a great deal easier than it is if this were the case, but the fact is that intonation is too complex and too flexible to be confined within such narrow rules.

Broadly speaking, any sentence type can be linked with any tone group, and in this chapter we shall consider the effect of our ten tone groups in association with each of four main sentence types, statement, question, command and interjection, and we shall try to explain at every step the contribution which the tone group makes to the total meaning of the sense group. The four sentence types are, and are meant to be, very wide and at times overlapping categories, and we shall not try to define or limit them. They will simply provide examples of the working of intonation in very different sentence structures.

This implied separation of intonation and sentence structure is an analytical procedure which is thoroughly justifiable as an aid to teaching and learning, but it should be remembered that in reality that part of the speaker’s meaning which is assumed to be carried by the structure of the sentence – words and word order – and that part attributed to intonation are welded together to form the total meaning of the utterance at a particular time and in a particular context. However, the student using this book undoubtedly understands the basic meaning of English words, though not the role of intonation; so the separation can and does exist for him, and it is convenient to make use of this in what follows.

So this chapter provides a description of the attitudes conveyed by the different tone groups in association with the various sentence types. This description is a difficult business because it involves using words to suggest effects which are usually achieved by intonation. This means that words alone do not always give a very accurate impression of the attitude conveyed, yet enough can be done to produce a basis for the further development of the student’s comprehension.

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