Intonation (linguistics)

Variation in pitch

In linguistics, intonation is the variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression, to signal the illocutionary act performed by a sentence, or to regulate the flow of discourse. For example, the English question "Does Maria speak Spanish or French?" is interpreted as a yes-or-no question when it is uttered with a single rising intonation contour (i.e.,‍is Maria able to speak either Spanish or French?), but is interpreted as an alternative question when uttered with a rising contour on "Spanish" and a falling contour on "French" (i.e.,‍I know Maria can speak either Spanish or French, but I don't know which it is‍— which is it?). Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, its effects almost always work hand-in-hand with other prosodic features.

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