Intonation and Communication

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Intonation and Communication

• Martha C. Pennington
• Professor of Writing and Linguistics

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The Unreality of Grammars

• Traditional grammars, in relying on a written
  language norm filtered through an ancient
  language Latin and in privileging the sentence
  as the essential unit of analysis, have described
  language in terms of an abstract ideal rather
  than as a central aspect of human behavior.
• Pennington, M. C. (2002). Grammar and
  communication New directions in theory and
  practice. In Eli Hinkel and Sandra Fotos (eds.),
  New Perspectives on Grammar Teaching in Second
  Language Classrooms. Mahwah, New Jersey and
  London Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, p. 96.

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Communication is a process of

• (i) A speaker signaling intentions to
• an addressee, and then
• (ii) The addressee making inferences
• about what the speaker meant by
• the signal.
• Sperber, D., Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance
  Communication and Cognition. 2nd edition. Oxford
  Blackwell.

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Means of Communicating Other Than Language

• Gestures
• (e.g. pointing, waving, shrugged shoulders)
• Facial expressions
• (e.g. smiling, frowning, quizzical look)
• Eye contact
• (brief or sustained, and lack thereof)
• Physical distance
• (from minimal separation to far apart)

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AND

• Bodily orientation
• (e.g. directly facing or leaning
• towards one or another participant)
• Type and amount of touching
• (e.g. of a persons arm while speaking)
• Other forms of physical contact
• (e.g. intimate contact such as kissing),
• which may preclude or take precedence
• over linguistic expression

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3 Methods of Signaling

• Describing-as
• We describe something as a fish when we
• present the word fish.
• Indicating
• We indicate an individual fish when we point at
  it.
• Demonstrating
• We demonstrate the size of a fish when we hold
  our hands so far apart.
• Clark, Herbert H. (1996). Using Language.
• Cambridge Cambridge University Press, p. 391.

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Meaning by Contrast

• Instead of thinking of meaning as a property
  which is inherently attached to the word, we can
  focus upon the way people use wordsand, indeed,
  other linguistic itemsto create oppositions, as
  in friend not relative, friend not merely
  acquaintance, which are of relevance to whatever
  communicative purpose is presently being pursued.
  
• Brazil, David (1995). A Grammar of Speech.
  Oxford Oxford University Press, p. 35.

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An Everyday Example

• PAT
• AND
• MARTY
• They live together and are going about their
  normal Saturday routine.

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Those 3 Little Words

• I got it!

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Some Meanings of Get

• SUBJECT AS RECIPIENT
• I got a letter. (receive)
• I got the flu. (catch)
• I got sick. (became)
• I got stung by a bee. (be)
• SUBJECT AS ACTOR
• I got my child from the daycare center.
  (fetch)
• I got my baby some new blankets. (obtain)
• I got dinner ready. (caused to happen)

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High Key Intonation

• It narrows down the context of assumptions to one
  contrasting with all other possibilities.
• Brazil, David (1997). The Communicative Value
• of Intonation in English. Cambridge Cambridge
  University Press.

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Intonation as a Signaling System

• Informing (Informational) Function
• Signaling informativeness Salience/non-salience
• (high pitch vs. non-high pitch)
• Structuring (Syntactic) Function
• Signaling boundaries Completion/non-completion
• (pitch fall vs. absence of fall)
• Interactional (Participatory) Function
• Signaling participation Hearer
  involvement/non-involvement (pitch rise vs.
  non-rise)

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Functions of Intonation

• Chunking and structuring information
• Managing speech production and interaction
• Revealing the ongoing state of knowledge
  construction and control of discourse

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Speakers construct their utterances in relation
to

• their own purposes and intentions
• their knowledge of communicative context,
  including what the hearer
• can be presumed to know and
• their knowledge of contextual effects.

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The communication is realized by means of

• (i) the specific speakers selection of (ii)
  tonal pattern together with
• (iii) specific words and
• (iv) their arrangement as exactly the right
  language, no less and no more, given (v) the
  specific context and
• (vi) intended audience, to trigger the intended
  interpretation.

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Conclusions about Language

• Language is necessarily social and must be
  referenced to the joint actions of at least two
  people.
• Meaning does not inhere in a sentence but is
  created in the interaction between speaker and
  hearer.

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Conclusions about Intonation

• The tonal properties of an utterance are
  essential to the precise coding of a message to
  be both efficient and interpretable by a
  particular audience on a particular occasion.
• The workings of intonation make a very good case
  that a grammar abstracted from real communicative
  events and contexts is not merely abstract but
  unreal and unworkable.