- 243 - The “you” is focused because in the previous utterance he confused his pronouns “I” for
“you” and so the “you” is a clarification; it is marked phonologically by a high rise coupled with heavy stress.
“Rice” is marked by a short burst of intensity and a very short, low rise; and “Wong” by intensity, and a short rise followed by a longer low fall. There is a 2.5secs. pause between
“to” and “Mr. “ while he thinks what to say next. The final example contains a particularly expressive verb and, though there is nothing
dramatic about the phonology, it does seem to fit the sentiments being conveyed by the utterance see figure 6.18:
23 SO FAther CHRIST mas CHUCK some RICE
The focus is on “chuck” and this is marked in the phonology by greater intensity than that of the surrounding syllables and a short rise which is higher in pitch than the rest of the
utterance. The causal “so” is marked phonologically by a long falling glide 265-210Hz which is considerably longer than the others in the utterance; it is also the most heavily
stressed syllable of the utterance. The prop “rice” is marked by a short rise-fall; we have seen above that there is a tendency for important lexical items to be marked by rise-fall
contours. The conclusion of the story is rather bitty; Kenneth intervenes with his ideas and Sakander
merely repeats them without too much conviction.
6.3.8 The Acquisition of Intonation
It is reported that some young native speakers often mimic adult intonation patterns in the “babbling period” before they are a year old, particularly the pattern used by mothers on
“all gone”, involving a sequence of high-level and mid-level tones Nakazima 1962. Late in the babbling period they may even produce whole sentence intonations, sometimes called
“jargon intonation” Peters 1977. Other children show a special use of pitch during the early “one-word period” one year to one year and nine months, each word being “yoked
to a particular pitch pattern” Cruttenden 1986:172. See also Halliday 1975. These early uses of intonation “do not, however, appear to be the genesis of intonation”. This lies “in
the ability to contrast a fall and a rise on one syllable or spread at most over two syllables”. See Leopold 1947:255. This contrast may or may not be present in the babbling period;
for many children it is certainly present during the one-word period, when falls are used for
- 244 - deictics and rises for requests, with the falling tone being the most frequently used. Some
of the meanings reported for rises during the one-word and two-word i.e. one year and nine months to two years periods are counting, echoing, listing, questioning, attention-
getting, and learning formulas such as “thank you”, “bye-bye”, and “there you are”. See Wells, Montgomery and MacLure 1979. The distinction between high and low varieties of
falls and rises follows soon afterwards and there may also be present some uses of fall-rise, for warning or contrast.
The ability to vary the nucleus placement comes at the two-word stage and, early in the two-word stage, nucleus placement is often linked to sentence-type e.g. DADdy garden
means “It’s Daddy’s garden”, and Daddy GARden means “Daddy’s in the garden”. See Wieman 1976. Later, as children produce three- and four-word sentences, they are
stringing sentences together and varying the nucleus “to take account of old information”. However, it is an over-statement to claim that children learn the intonation of their
language before they learn any words. Studies of intonation comprehension have shown clearly that children at the age of ten “are not able to use intonational meaning in the way
that adults do…So certainty of judgment about the local meanings associated with intonation patterns is still being developed at least at the age of ten” Cruttenden
1986:174. See also Cruttenden 1974, 1985. So what about young second-language learners? How do they fit into the picture?
Cruttenden suggests that “there is undoubtedly an innate substratum to intonation: falls for closed meanings [i.e. assertive and non-continuative] and rises for open meanings [i.e. non-
assertive and continuative]. But, of course, a child still has to learn the fine details of the types of fall and rise involved in a particular language”. But the more difficult task for
second-language learners, as we have demonstrated from the data, is the learning of “the conventional overlay involved in a lot of local meanings and the conventional use of tones
indicating certain attitudes” 1986:174. In all our examples of the non-evaluative use of certain features of intonation, this has been the problem. If native speakers are still
acquiring this knowledge at the age of ten, it is not surprising that our 5-7 year-old non- native speakers sometimes use inappropriate intonation patterns which give the wrong
signals to their hearers. Perhaps it is remarkable that they get it right as often as they do?
- 245 -
6.4 Direct Speech Data
