Is English a tone language?

A

English has nothing like these prosodic characteristics of Thai, Mandarin, Zulu, Norwegian or Japanese. English does not use tone lexically: in this sense, it is not a tone language. But English does use tone for intonation.

We can say any English word with any of the intonational 'tones' identified in this book, but the choice of tone does not alter the lexical identity of the word. Whichever we say of

the lexical meaning (= the meaning as shown in a dictionary) is still the same. The non-lexical meaning is different, as discussed in chapter 2, where we see that a fall may indicate definiteness, a rise may indicate indicate incompleteness, and a fall-rise may indicate implications. But these intonational meanings apply equally to any other word: or, more usually, to a clause, sentence, or sentence fragment.

Thus English makes use of tone intonationally, but not lexically. In fact the intonation system of English constitutes the most important and complex part of English prosody. By combining different pitch levels (= unchanging pitch heights) and contours (= sequences of levels, changing pitch shapes) we express a range of intonational meanings: breaking the utterance into chunks, perhaps distinguishing between clause types (such as statements vs .questions), focusing on some part of the utterance and not on others, indication which part of our message is background and which is foreground, signalling our attitude to what we are saying.

B

Some of this intonational meanings is shown in writing, through the use of punctuation, but most of it is not. This is why spoken English, as spoken by native speakers, is richer in information content than written English. This is also why some non-native speakers, not being attuned to English intonation and what it means, may fail to catch a substantial part of the overall meaning of something spoken by a native speaker.

We complain, 'It's not what you said, it's the way that you said it', meaning that your words when written down appear innocuous - yet when spoken aloud they were offensive or insensitive. The same words in the same grammatical constructions may have different pragmatic effects. This is because they may differ in intonation, and perhaps also in other, paralinguistic features (e.g huskiness, brethiness, whisper, nasality, special voice qualities).

C

Like other prosodic characteristics, intonation is partly universal (= the same in all languages), but also partly language-specific (= differing from one language to another). Languages differ in intonation patterns they use, and in the extent to which they rely on intonation to convey aspects of meaning. More importantly, the same physical patterns of rises and falls may have different meanings - different pragmatic implications - in different languages.

A low-rise tone pattern may signal a simple statement in Danish or Norwegian. But in most kinds of English it has implications of non-finality, or perhaps uncertainty or truculence. An accent on a pronoun (a high tone, say) may have a neutral meaning in many African languages, and indeed in French or some other European languages; but in English it highlights the pronoun, perhaps suggesting a contrast between its referent and some other person involved.

Between speakers of different languages, intonation patterns can be much more easily misunderstood than segmental patterns.