A pragmatic approach to English intonation

Includes bibliographical references (pages 100-112)Intonation is an omnipresent but elusive feature of spoken English. No utterance can occur without it, and yet intonation has successfully escaped adequate or accurate description by linguists. Attempts at incorporating intonation into various grammars of English have been hampered by its mystique. The primary obstacle is that there is no uniform definition of intonation. Investigations into the grammatical function of intonation have dominated the field of study. Grammar-based approaches ignore the attitudinal functions of intonation and instead investigate the relation of intonation contours to syntactic structures. The approaches and their contributions to a linguistic theory of intonation are surveyed. Because of the grammarians' failure to discover systematic relations between either lexical categories or syntactic structures and intonation contours, some linguists began looking at intonation from a pragmatic or information theory approach. The recent work of linguists is not reflected in the teaching materials available to the instructor of English as a second language for use in the classroom. Adopting a linguistic model which incorporates pragmatic considerations facilitates the investigation of intonation in a number of ways. It would be of immeasurable advantage for the isolation of question intonations, the dissolution of the grammatical/attitudinal boundary, acceptance of presuppositional gramrnaticality, and the abandonment of the unnecessary quest for normal intonation