lintonation

Intonation is the variation of pitch in spoken language that is not used to distinguish word meaning but to convey information about syntax, information structure, emotion, or emphasis. It is a primary component of prosody, alongside rhythm and syllable structure, and it interacts with segmental phonology in shaping intelligible speech. In most languages, pitch is organized into pitch accents on prominent syllables and boundary tones that mark the edges of intonational phrases. The arrangement of these cues yields characteristic contours, such as falling final intonation in declarative sentences and rising final intonation in many yes–no questions, as well as diverse patterns for wh-questions and focus.

Intonation serves multiple functions: signaling focus and given/new information, marking sentence modality (statement, question, exclamation), and guiding discourse structure across utterances. In tone languages, pitch also carries lexical or grammatical meaning, so intonation interacts with but does not replace this lexical pitch system. Cross-linguistic variation is large; some languages rely heavily on final particles or word order for sentence type, while others use rising or falling pitch and dedicated particles.

The analysis of intonation typically employs phonological frameworks such as autosegmental-metrical (AM) theory and annotation schemes like ToBI (Tone and Break Indices), which label pitch accents, phrase accents, and boundary tones. Empirical work uses instrumental phonetics to measure F0 contours and perception experiments to assess intelligibility and emotion. In applied contexts, understanding intonation informs speech synthesis, speech recognition, language teaching, and clinical linguistics.