Consider the following sentence:

We didn’t say she painted people’s feet.

Seems straightforward enough. However, if you give particular emphasis to the first word:

We didn’t say she painted people’s feet.

…it means something a little different from the way you probably first read it. It means something quite specific, in fact: it means someone else said that she painted people’s feet, but it wasn’t us!

If we put particular emphasis on the last word:

We didn’t say she painted people’s feet.

…the meaning changes again. Now I clearly did say something about her painting people’s body parts, but it’s not their feet that she paints (it’s something else).

You can repeat this experiment for every word in the sentence, and the meaning will change every time.

This feature of spoken language—the way we group words together and lend different kinds of emphasis to them to signal different meanings—has a name. It’s called intonation.

The music of speech

Intonation (also known as prosody) is the music of speech—rhythm and stress, and the rise and fall of the pitch of the voice. English is not a tone language like Mandarin or Vietnamese, where different pitches can change the linguistic meaning of a word, but intonation nonetheless conveys a range of information, focusing the listener on what the speaker thinks is important, clarifying statements that might be ambiguous from the text alone, and, of course, communicating the speaker’s attitude and emotions. Just as it is possible for non-native speakers to make mistakes in pronunciation that can lead to misunderstandings, it is possible to make mistakes in intonation. Native speakers often make allowances for mistakes in pronunciation when listening to non-native speakers, but less often account for the possibility of mistakes in intonation, as it tends to pass further under the radar of conscious attention. This can result in mistaken judgements about speakers’ basic personality traits and intentions! For all of these reasons, it is crucial for non-native speakers to learn the patterns and meanings of English intonation.

Let’s begin by talking a bit about how we use intonation to organize spoken English into discrete units, called intonational phrases.