An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

//Years ago // when I was married // about I don’t know how long ago // about 10 or 12 
years ago // I lived in Mosman // and I had a really nice neighbour called Stan //.
Tone groups are characterized by ‘pitch movement’ (also called ‘tone’), that is, the 
voice going up and down, and sometimes set off by pauses. Some of the chunking 
is very obvious, but in other cases there is more than one possibility, so that if 
readers were to read this utterance out loud, some would say:
// I lived in Mosman // and I had a really nice neighbour called Stan //
as two units, whereas others would divide it up into three:
// I lived in Mosman // and I had a really nice neighbour // called Stan //
Prominence
Staying with the same utterance for a moment, Anne makes certain syllables 
more salient than others, that is to say, she gives them ‘prominence’. To do 
this, she uses pitch movement on the syllables highlighted by small capitals: 
MOS
man, 
NEIGH
bour, 
STAN
; she also pronounces these syllables slightly more loudly. 
In any tone unit, the syllable on which the major pitch movement takes place, 
or begins, is called ‘tonic syllable’ – the syllable with the greatest prominence. 
Analysing her ‘intonation’, or speech melody, thus helps us recognize how she 
uses the prosodic feature of ‘pitch’ (perceptual label for ‘high’/’low’), sometimes 
in combination with slightly increased loudness and vowel length, to foreground 
what is important. Signalling prominence is clearly an extremely important factor 
in getting our message across.
Turn-taking
Next, it always seems to be very clear to both interlocutors in our example when 
they should speak, when they should be silent, and when and how (not) to yield 

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Speaking and Pronunciation
the floor to the other person. For the precise timing of this turn-taking, ‘pitch’ 
and ‘loudness’ are particularly important. Thus Jane’s back-channel signal ‘Mmm’ 
(J1) is fairly low in pitch and volume, indicating that she is listening, not bidding 
for a turn or interrupting. Her next utterance, however, ‘A funnel web!’ is spoken 
much more loudly and with considerable pitch movement, reaching fairly high 
pitch on the first syllable of funnel. Anne’s subsequent ‘Yeah’ may be seen as her 
acknowledgement of this much more noticeable interjection by Jane before she 
continues her story. A little later, Anne’s ‘And um’ (A5) is again at relatively low 
pitch and volume, giving the impression that she is hesitating, trying to think of 
what she wants to say next. This offers Jane an ‘opening’ for putting her question 
in (J5). In this sense, then, Anne’s low pitch functions as a turn-yielding device, 
whereas the higher pitch of Jane’s ‘Did’ signals a bid for a turn.
Introducing and Ending Topics
We can also look at pitch level from the point of view of speakers’ topic 
management, which is closely bound up with turn-taking mechanisms. It is 
easy to imagine Anne’s initial ‘And’ (A5) being pronounced quite differently: 
emphatically, dramatically, to heighten Jane’s anticipation of what happened 
next, with higher pitch and higher volume, and even some pitch movement on 
this one syllable. In that case Jane would have been very unlikely to come in with 
her question (J5). Consider, for instance, how Anne introduces the topic of the 
spider (A2):
// And a 
FUN
nel web spider jumped out and //
where she jumps to ‘high pitch’ on the first prominent syllable of the tone unit. 
‘High pitch’ (and ‘low’ pitch) are, of course, not absolute values but mean high 
(or low) in comparison to the immediately preceding tone unit, in this case 
higher than the concluding tone unit in A1, where ‘... with a little