The Teaching of Intonation

Abstract

As Stress and Intonation are among the standard subjects of any phonetics test, students will do well to learn at least one of the various classifications and sets of rules that exist — they will find a serviceable one in Christophersen’s book. But they should remember that such classifications do not cover the facts as they are. The study of these phenomena in English — as in other languages — is only in its initial stages and very little is known about the interplay of stress and intonation, of loudness and pitch, and the degrees of their mutual dependence or independence. The phenomena are so complicated, they seem to be bound to vague patterns obeyed by the whole speech community, and yet again they are so free and to such an extent something of the individual, that a classification is extremely difficult. One phonetician collected over fifteen different intonations of a short sentence which recurred regularly in the BBC programmes! It might be preferable to discard all positive rules as premature from the teaching programme as long as they are based on such scanty material, so hastily and arbitrarily classified with so much internal and mutual contradiction as is the case with many of the present ones. One might prefer to restrict oneself to pointing out mistakes and to negative rules such as: do not pronounce relative pronouns on a high tone.¹)