PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY, THE ROLE OF INTONATION IN MEANING

Abstract:

This article examines the Intonation, the variation of pitch in spoken language, plays a crucial role in conveying meaning beyond the lexical and syntactic levels. This article explores how intonation functions as a key prosodic feature in communication, affecting sentence modality, speaker attitude, and discourse structure. Through analysis of intonational patterns and their semantic and pragmatic implications, the study highlights the integral relationship between phonetic features and linguistic meaning. Speech communities will vary in the extent to which they employ those meanings, and in the choices they make when they conflict. What they will never do, however, is change the natural form-function relations that they embody. By contrast, grammaticalised meanings often mimic the natural meanings, but linguistic change may create quite arbitrary form-meaning relations when forms are phonologised, and the semantics is systematised. English grammaticalised intonational meaning concerns information status.