Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

intonation: the systematic rise and fall in the pitch of the voice during speech
nuclear tone: significant changes in pitch on one or more syllables
tone language: a language in which words are separated by intonation, for
instance, Chinese
Keywords
Box 4.8 English intonation
High Fall
`yes
High Rise
´yes?
Low Fall
`
yes
Low Rise
´
yes
Fall Rise
yes
yes.
Rise Fall
yes
yes
Level
c o o e e
–
cooee
y e s
y e s
y e s
y e s
The problem is that, while people agree that intonation is important, they dis-
agree on its function. Some say that it is used for making grammatical distinc-
tions: ‘He’s 
`going’ with falling intonation is a statement; ‘He’s ´going?’ with
rising intonation is a question. Indeed, rising intonation is perhaps the most fre-
quent way of making questions in French. But this explanation is only partially
successful as some questions tend not to have rises – wh-questions such as ‘What’s
the
`time?’ usually have falls. Others think that intonation is used to convey emo-
tion and attitude: ‘He
`llo’ with a high fall sounds welcoming, with a low fall
‘He`llo’ cold, with a fall-rise ‘He

llo’ doubtful, and so on.
Intonation also varies between speakers. There is an overall difference between
British and American patterns: apparently British men sound effeminate to
American ears because of our use of a higher pitch range. Younger people around
the world use rising intonation for statements, ‘I like 
´
beer’ where older people use
a fall ‘I like 
`beer’. Even within the UK there are differences (Grabe and Post,
2002). People living in Cambridge use 90 per cent falls for declaratives, those in
Belfast 80 per cent rises. People in western areas such as Liverpool cut off the end
of falling tones in short vowels. People in eastern areas such as Newcastle com-
press them, that is, make the fall more rapid.
The languages of the world fall into two groups: intonation languages and tone
languages. Chinese is a ‘tone’ language that separates different words purely by
intonation: ‘
´li zi’ (rising tone) means ‘pear’; ‘

li zi’ (fall rise) means ‘plum’, and ‘
`li
zi’ (falling) means ‘chestnut’. In tone languages a tone functions like a phoneme
in that it distinguishes words with different meanings. Indeed, this means that
Chinese tones are stored in the left side of the brain along with the vocabulary,

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while English intonation is stored in the right side along with other emotional
aspects of thinking. In intonation languages the intonation pattern has a number
of functions; it may distinguish grammatical constructions, as in question ‘
´Beer?’
versus statement ‘
`Beer’; it may show discourse connections, for example, a new
topic starting high and finishing low; it may hint at the speakers’ attitudes, say,
polite ‘Good`bye’ versus rude ‘Good`bye!’
Adult L2 learners of Chinese have no problem in distinguishing Chinese tones,
though with less confidence than native speakers of Chinese (Leather, 1987).
Adults learning Thai, another tone language, were worse at learning tones than
children (Ioup and Tansomboon, 1987).
L2 learners may have major problems when going from an intonation language
such as English to a tone language such as Chinese, and vice versa. Hence people
have found Chinese speaking English to be comparatively unemotional, simply
because the speakers are unused to conveying emotion though intonation pat-
terns, while in reverse, English learners of Chinese make lexical mistakes because
they are not used to using intonation to distinguish lexical meanings.
With languages of the same type, say, English speakers learning Spanish, another
intonation language, there are few problems with intonation patterns that are sim-
ilar in the first and second languages. The problems come when the characteristics
of the first language are transferred to the second. My hunch is that our interpreta-
tion of intonation patterns by L2 users is responsible for some national stereotypes – 
Italians sound excitable and Germans serious to an English ear, because of the
meaning of their first language patterns when transferred to English.
It is also a problem when a pattern has a different meaning in the second lan-
guage. A student once said to me at the end of a class, ‘Good
`bye!’; I assumed she
was mortally offended. However, when she said it at the end of every class, I realized
that it was an inappropriate intonation pattern transferred from her first language –
which reveals the great danger of intonation mistakes: the listener does not realize
you have made a straightforward language mistake like choosing a wrong word, but
ascribes to you the attitude you have accidentally conveyed. Intonation mistakes are
often not retrievable, simply because no one realizes that a mistake has been made.
As with VOT, there may be a reverse transfer of intonation back on to the
learner’s first language. Dutch people who speak Greek have slightly different
question intonation from monolinguals (Mennen, 2004), and the German of
German children who speak Turkish is different from those who do not (Queen,
2001). Once again, the first language is affected by the second.