Intonation and Its Uses: Melody in Grammar and Discourse

482 Pages·1989·15.457 MB·English

by  Dwight Bolinger

INTONATION
AND ITS USES

MELODY IN GRAMMAR AND DISCOURSE
Dwight Bolinger
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Stanford, Califomia 1989
Stanford University Press, Stanford, Califomia
©1989 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford ]unior University
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalogingdn-Publication Data
Bolinger, Dwight Le Merton, 1907-
Intonation and its uses.
Bibliography: p.
Inciudes index.
1. Intonation (Phonetics) 2. Grammar, Comparative and
genera]. 3. Language and languages—Variati0n.
I. Title.
P111-B59 1939 414 38-35571
rsan 0-8047-1535-1 (all-c. paper)
To the memory of L
And all that was.

Preface
This book is a companion to Intonation and Its Parts (Bolinger 1986) but
it is not a sequel in the sense that familiarity with the earlier book is
indispensable for understanding the main content of the later one.
Such familiarity is helpful, but a good portion of the first volume was
taken up with explaining elementary matters that can be gleaned, if
needed by the present reader, from other sources. And much of the
rest of that volume was devoted to describing and justifying the into-
national shapes whose meanings, once the shapes are identified, are
more or less self-evident. Furthermore the graphic system of repre-
sentation makes fewest demands on the reader. Add to this the care-
ful specification of context—as has been the aim here throughout-
and the intonation much of the time comes clear without elaboration;
that is, how what is to be said is said under those circumstances.
This frees us to focus on the flesh and take the skeleton for granted.
We go from the outlines of the patterns to how they reveal themselves
in society and what they do in communication. There is a dimension
of variation: differences among speakers relate to age, sex, occupa-
tion, and above all to location in social and physical space. Variation is
a test for the working principle that intonation, in however veiled a
manner, is always a reflection of internal states. Do women use more
“tentative” intonations because they are more unsure of themselves?
Are some societies “more affable" or “more inhibited” than others?
Are children "more spontaneous" than adults? If so, what appear to
be arbitrary differences between one group or speaker and another
may have deep roots in human psychology.
As for the work that intonation does as an instrument of communi-
cation, the leading question is how far conventionalization goes. Does
intonation cease to be an expressive medium and become a symbolic
one, disengaging itself completely from its ties to emotion? We know
that at least some of the arbitrary uses of tone in tone languages took
their origins from associations that were originally expressive. This is
viii Preface
a resource always open to children, who may substitute an intonation
for a distinction that is later transferred to something in morphology
or syntax. An example was the “low pitch for negation” strategy re-
corded (Intonation and Its Parts, p. 389) for two child subjects. But such
cases are transitory in English. The fundamental iconic nature of into-
nation reasserts itself, and-at least in the cases so far studied and set
forth in Parts II and III here—the contrasts are better understood as
manifestations of feeling than as formal signals in the domain of
grammar and logic.
My thanks are due to many more people than there is space to men-
tion, and I hope that my citations from their works may serve as rec-
ognition of my indebtedness to them. Six in particular have helped
me not only by their published writings but in fairly extensive corre-
spondence, which I pray I have not abused in these pages: Isamu
Abe, Alan Cruttenden, Anne Cutler, Laurentia Dascalu, Ines Loi Cor-
vetto, and Laszlo Varga.
As with the volume that preceded this one, my gratitude must
again be expressed to “my” editors at Stanford University Press,
Karen Brown Davison and Shirley Taylor, for their proof of the finest
professionalism, which consists in caring about, as well as for, the
rough pages entrusted to them.
D.B.
Contents
Introduction: The Universality of Afi‘ect—
and a Review of Symbols 1
PART I. VARIATION
1. Age and Sex 9
Age, 11. Sex, 21.
2. Dialect and Language 26
British and American English, 28. Scottish English, 32. Anglo-Irish
English, 34. Southern U.S. English, 37. Russian, 41. German,
42. Dutch, 43. Sardinian, 44. Italian, 46. Romanian, 47.
Spanish, 48. Chinese, 49. Japanese, 5o. Polish, 50. Syrian
Arabic, 51. Hungarian, 55. Toba Batak, 60. Impressions and
Misimpressions, 61.
PART II. INTONATION AND GRAMMAR:
CLAUSES AND ABOVE
3. Crosscurrents 67
Clues from Reading, 68. Word Meanings Affected, 7o. Pragmatic
vs. “Literal” Meaning, 74. Perseveration, 76. Mismatches and
Adjustments, 77. Attempts at Grammatical Explanation, 79.
4. Demarcation 81
Coordinate vs. l-lierarchic Modifiers, 84. Other Phrasal Divisions,
86. Numerical Sequences, 87. Discontinuous Constituents, 89.
Ellipsis, 92.
x Contents
5. Questions 98
Yes-N0 Questions. 99. Wh Questions, 106. Complementary
Questions, 112. Altemative Questions, 113. Tag Questions, 115.
Reprise Questions, 133.
6. Nonquestions 144
Declaratives, 144. Imperatives, 150.
7. Dependent Clauses and Other Dependencies 171
Conditional Clauses, 172. Other Adverbial Clauses, 182. Parenthesis
and Restriction, 185. Cleft Sentences, 203. Series, 205.
PART III. INTONATION AND GRAMMAR:
BELOW THE CLAUSE
8. Accent and Morphology 213
Compounding. 215. Accent in Compounds and Phrases, 220.
9. Accent in Higher Units 224
Compounds and Phrases Again, 225. Single Domains (lust One
Accent), 228. Multiple Domains (More Than One Accent), 238. Other
"Domains," 244.
10. Exclamations and Interjections 248
Identification of Types, 249. Intonation of Types, 255. Exclamatory
Idioms in Detail, 263.
11. ‘Well’ 300
PART IV. INTONATION AND LOGIC
12. Is There an Intonation of "Contrast"? 341
Profile A and the Depth of Fall, 342. Other Shapes Than Profile A,
344. Alleged Metaphors and Alleged Mistakes, 347.
13. Accent and Entailment 350
Ordered Entailments, 350. One Accent per Phrase?, 353. Extra
Accents and "Relevance," 357. The Psychological Reality of Left-to-
Contents xi
Right Processing, 359. The Importance of Words, 361. What Segment
Owns the Focal Accent?, 362.
14. Accent and Denial 365
Direct and Indirect Denial, 366. Relevance of Direct and Indirect to
Accent, 367. Validity of the Distinction, 371. Direct and Indirect
Affirmation, 374. The Power Function, 375. Accents on ”Unimportant”
Words, 375.
15. An Intonation of Factuality? 380
Factuality and Counterfactuality, 380. Conformatory and Confirmatory,
383. A Congeries of Cues, 387. Theme and Rheme, 389.
16. A Practical Case: Broadcast Prosody 392
Appendixes
A. Accent in Answers to Questions, 401. B. Tagged Imperatives, 408.
Reference Matter
Notes, 421. References Cited, 442. Index of Profiles and Contours,
455. General Index, 457.