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Essay / Human Language: Intonation - 1961
The explanation of the intonation system of a particular language or dialect is a particularly difficult task since intonation is paradoxically both one of the most universal and one of the most language specific. human language. Intonation is universal because every language has intonation. Hockett (1963) made this one of ten remarkable experimental generalizations about languages: generalizations that we should not necessarily want to include in the definition of what constitutes a language, but which simply turn out to be true. Intonation is also considered universal because many of the linguistic and paralinguistic functions of intonation systems appear to be shared by languages of very different origins. It has often been mentioned, for example, that in a large majority of languages, some sort of high tone (final or non-final) can be used in contrast with a lower tone to show that an utterance is intended as a rather question. as a question. statement. In this sense, the universal status of intonation is quite different from that observed for other phonological systems such as vowels or consonants for example. Even if it is true that all languages have systems of vowels and consonants, and even if similar patterns of vowels and consonants can be located in languages that are only very distant from each other, these systems do not do not convey meanings directly in the same way that intonation seems to do. There is, for example, no regular universal meaning that can be attributed to the difference between front and back vowels or between stops and fricatives. Despite this universal quality, the exact characteristics of a particular speaker's intonation system are also very precise. ..... middle of paper ......daily communication, faulty intonation can appear absurd and faults in intonation can give rise to misunderstandings. This study attempts to examine to what extent knowledge of a second language has an influence on the acquisition of appropriate intonation patterns of the second language and whether the realization of the intonation pattern has received sufficient attention or not . Needless to say, it is essential that second language learners, in order to master all aspects of the second language, are fully aware of the prosody and intonation patterns of the target language. Here we want to analyze whether the difference in target language proficiency level plays a role in learning second language intonation patterns. In other words, knowledge of prosody and suprasegmental features of the second language would be improved when accompanied by other aspects of the second language..