Intonation's many functions

For the non-linguist, intonation is often thought of as a feature of human voice which conveys emotions and attitudes. Yet Intonation has another – although considered marginal by linguists – role in speech: to indicate the declarative or interrogative sentence modality and its many variants (whose linguistic status is often debatable). But intonation is also heavily conditioned by linguistic rules, specific to each language, respected by the speaker even in the most severe physical conditions of speech production. Intonation in the (linguistic) system When we speak, when we read, even silently, a musical movement inevitably accompanies our words, constituting the sentence intonation. For a long time, linguists have relegated this music of the sentence to the study of emotions and social attitudes, with the exception of a very limited part given in the language system, with the indication of the declarative or interrogative modality of the sentence