Prominence And Intonation In Discourse

The melody or pitch pattern of a sentence.

The beat or rhythm of a sentence.

One of the segmental features of a language.

The loudest syllable in a word that is emphasized more than the others.

Pattern A

Pattern B

Pattern C

Pattern D

Pattern A

Pattern B

Pattern C

Pattern C

Pattern A

Pattern B

Pattern C

Pattern D

Pattern A

Pattern B

Pattern C

Pattern D

Pattern "a"

Pattern "b"

Pattern "c"

Pattern "d"

Pattern A

Pattern B

Pattern C

Pattern D

Languages like Korean and Japanese don’t have intonation. They just sound flat.

All languages have intonation, but they don’t all have the same kind of intonation.

A word that is in contrast with another word.

A word that tells new information, not old information.

A word that the speaker wants to emphasize.

The last content word in the sentence.

It could be any of these.

A sentence must have more than one thought group.

A thought group has its own intonation contour.

A thought group is often also a grammatical unit, like a phrase or a clause.

All speakers of a language break their speech up into thought groups in the same way.

We pause before and after a thought group, but not in the middle of one.