Thought experiments about intonation

It is easy to demonstrate the fact that there is no causal link between intonational choice and attitude.  However, it requires a couple of pre-requisites. The first pre-requisite is that one should be prepared to question what textbooks and teacher-training manuals tell us about speech. What they tell us is usually useful advice for speaking carefully, but  usually useless as a description of what happens in real-life spontaneous speech. The second pre-requisite is that one should be prepared to do thought experiments with the assertions that are made about the relationship between attitudinal meanings and intonation.

The thought experiments include:

• place the utterance in a new context and use the same tone choices – different meanings will be conveyed (you can see a related demonstration of this by Geoff Lindsay here)
• retain the same context as in the original example, and change the tones, the attitudinal meaning will remain the same

I have demonstrated this thought experiment at work repeatedly in my writing. Perhaps the first time was in 1993 – in Evaluating Descriptions of Intonation: A Comparison of Discourse Intonation and Crystal’s Description. This was a departmental paper which I have just re-typed and edited and is available as a pdf here (scroll down to 1993a). The thought experiment is described on page 28.

The main part of this paper is a comparison of transcriptions of the same recording (Talking about Football from Crystal & Davy 1975) . The two descriptions were Discourse Intonation and Crystal’s description as described in Crystal (1969). Not for the faint-hearted.

Crystal, D. (1969) Prosodic Systems and Intonation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Crystal, D. & Davy, D. (1975) Advanced Conversational English, Harlow: Longman.