This research aims to seek the intonation patterns and the meanings according to the sentence pattern in various discourse contexts and to build the foundation that English learners can understand and produce the proper intonation according to the dis...
This research aims to seek the intonation patterns and the meanings according to the sentence pattern in various discourse contexts and to build the foundation that English learners can understand and produce the proper intonation according to the discourse context.
Since Halliday(1967a) discussed the relationship between intonation and information structure in English, many researchers have discussed the relationship between intonation and information structure. They agreed that the topic and the focus as information units to make the information structure were realized as an intonation. However, they explained differently how the information unit could be realized as an intonation.
Their arguments can be classified as follows. First, the information unit can be realized as a pitch accent such as H*, L*( Jackendoff 1972; Bolinger 1986; Vallduví & Engdahl 1996; Gundel 1999; Gundel & Fretheim 2004). They think that the topic has a L+H* pitch accent and the focus has a H* pitch accent. Second, the information unit can be realized as a tune such as H*L-L%(Pierrehumbert 1980; Steedman 1991, 2000). They think that the topic has a L+H* L-H%(L%) tune and the focus has a H* L-L%(H%) tune. Third, the information unit can be realized as a boundary tone such as H%, L%(Lambrecht & Michaelis 1998). They say that the topic has a H% tone and the focus has a L% tone.
In this research, I have analyzed the topic and the focus of sentences using real discourse data unlike the previous theoretical intonation researches. The intonational analysis of the TV discussion data in 김화영(2005) and 이용재 외(2006) had a problem of a limited analysis – they just analyzed the intonation of the positive statements. Therefore, this research tried to contain the negative sentences as well as the positive ones as an analytical object of intonation using a more private conversational situation, that is, telephone conversations. For the private conversational data, I used the Linguistic Data Consortium data. The total amount of time used in the intonational analysis was 150 minutes(a phone call takes about 30 minutes * 5 times). Each sentence of the data was divided into two parts: the topic and the focus. The topics were also divided into two parts: contrastive(infomative contrastive topics and basic contrastive topics) vs. non-contrastive(pronoun type non-contrastive topics and noun type non-contrastive topics). Based on the previous researches, the foci were divided into three; neutral, informational, contrastive. This classified data was analyzed through a ToBI system, based on the intonational phonology. The negative sentences as well as the positive ones were contained for the intonational analysis.
The results of this research are as follows. In the case of non-contrastive topics, the pronoun type non-contrastive topics are mainly realized without any pitch accents, while the noun type non-contrastive topics are realized mainly with a H* pitch accent. In the case of contrastive topics, the informative contrastive topics have a strong will to offer new information, so they are mainly produced with a H* pitch accent, while the basic contrastive topics have a strong contrastive meaning, so they are used with a H* or L+H* pitch accent. In the case of the private conversation, the basic contrastive topics can be realized without any pitch accents. In the case of foci, the informative foci are usually realized with a H* pitch accent. Contrastive foci are realized mainly with a L+H* pitch accent in the public discussion, while they can be realized with a H* pitch accent in the private telephone conversation. When it comes to the argument on whether the topic and the focus are realized as a pitch accent or a tune, the results of this research show that the topics are mainly produced with a pitch accent, and the focus has a tend to be produced as a tune in the neutral and informative focus, and as a pitch accent in the contrastive focus.