More fun with intonation! Take the following two utterances¹…
What’s that in the road ahead?
What’s that in the road? A head?
Can you read them out loud in such a way as to make the distinction between the two clear? How are you doing it? What are you doing with your voice—with your intonation—to signal the different meanings?
Your first answer might be that you put a pause in the second one, after road?. While this is certainly likely—and while it is at least a partial answer—it is certainly not the only thing we’re likely doing here to signal the different meanings. In fact, to test this, try to read the second utterance again, with the same meaning, but with no pause at all after the word road.
What’s that in the road? A head?
If you succeeded (I hope you did!), then you’ll realize there’s a lot more to it. It’s not (mostly) about the pause…
In the first example, you probably spoke it all as one unit. In the second example, even when you spoke it without a pause, you probably used the pitch of your voice and the rhythm of the words to divide it into two separate pieces, clearly indicating a division after road.
We organize spoken information by dividing the stream of speech into discrete chunks. We can call these chunks intonational phrases. Each intonational phrase (or IP) has its own little melody—these discrete melodies are one of the main ways we signal separate IPs, in fact. Take the following sentence:
I don’t want to go to the beach.
In most circumstances, we’d probably expect this to be said all as one IP:
It is also possible to break it up into more than one IP:
In this case, you might be able to hear that there’s an intonational boundary after don’t.
We could even break the sentence up into 3 IPs:
In this case there are boundaries after don’t and go, as well as beach. Can you hear how the structure is made clear by the intonation? The words right before each boundary are stretched out a bit—they last longer. And a new little melody starts over again at the beginning of each new IP. Each IP is its own little snatch of music.
Dividing up speech into IPs is similar to the way we use punctuation to organize written language, though the intonational boundaries may not always line up exactly with where we’d put punctuation marks. The last three examples above are one example of this—you would never put commas in the middle of those sentences in writing. Similarly, there are places where commas are required in writing where we usually don’t put intonation breaks. One example is when little words like well, yes, no, oh, sure come at the beginning of a sentence. These are set off by commas in writing, but don’t generally have an intonation break in speech. Try to speak each of the following examples all as one IP:
Sure, I understand.
Well, I don’t know.
Yeah, I’d love to.
Little words like then, though, even, you know, which often come at the end of a sentence, are usually preceded by a comma but almost never have an intonation break. Try to speak each of the following examples all as one IP:
He’s pretty broken up, you know.
I’ll see you there, then.
She’s not afraid of it, though.
Of course, in many cases intonation boundaries will occur where punctuation would be used, but it’s important to be aware that this won’t always be the case.
This page has introduced the concept of intonational phrases, and the boundaries that mark their edges. On the next page, we’ll talk a bit more about boundaries, as well as the other major structural element of intonation: prominences.
¹The example at the top of the page, one of my favorites, is from J.C. Wells, English Intonation.