tone

Question 1

what are the five primary tones of English?

Answer 1

fall \
rise /
level -
rise-fall \/
fall-rise /\

Question 2

how is tone movement measured

Answer 2

from the tonic syllable to the end of the tone group

Question 3

what is tonality

Answer 3

breaking/ chunking up speech into meaningful units, relating to grammar, sense and tone groups.

Question 4

What communicative function(s) do tone groups realise in speech? Chunk it up into sense units/ information units.

Answer 4

• A pause
• A perceivable pitch change immediately following the final accented syllable
• Speed – syllables towards the end of a tone unit tend to be relatively slow while syllables towards the start of a tone unit tend to be relatively quick.

Question 5

what is a tone group

Answer 5

Information Unit

Question 6

what did Halliday say about tone

Answer 6

• Halliday (1967) realised that each tone unit realised semantically one information unit – in other words we use tone units to package our messages into bite sized chunks of information

Halliday also realised that if a tone unit equals an information unit it is likely to also correspond with a clause.

Question 7

//

Answer 7

boundaries of tone groups

Question 8

tonicity

Answer 8

This is to do with the distribution of information within a tone group. Some elements are New while others are Given.

Question 9

new

Answer 9

the speaker projects that the lexical item is not recoverable from cotext or context. Something that hasn’t been mentioned before or recently.

Question 10

given

Answer 10

the speaker projects that the lexical item is recoverable from cotext or context. This may be a pronoun. Available in cotext.

Question 11

onset

Answer 11

the first prominent syllable in a tone group. Optional.

Question 12

tonic

Answer 12

the final prominent syllable in a tone group. This is usually found in the final lexical item in the tone group. Must have a tonic.

Question 13

cotext

Answer 13

previous linguistic knowledge