INTONATION AND LANGUAGE TEACHING

It is not possible within the limited space of this book to give a complete survey of the structure and function of English into­nation, of various ways of its realization in English speech. We have so far confined ourselves, to the significance of intonation choices not only within utterances but also viewed on a relative­ly new linguistic level, i.e. discourse, to handle the way in which functional units combine together.

1. All intonation choices depend ultimately on the extralin-guistic situation the speakers find themselves in, on the speak­er's assessment of the state and extent of the common ground between himself and his listener.

2. There are three very important stages especially in class­room interaction — opening, answering and follow-up. An open­ing phrase sets up certain constraints and expectations which the answering phrase(s) fulfils. Answering is said to fulfil expec­tations but to set up none itself and thus can be followed either by a new opening, which may be produced by the same speaker or the other one, or by a follow-up, which reacts to or comments on the answering phrase.

— Have you got the time?

— It's three o'clock.

— Thanks.

Or:

— Have you got the time?

— It's three o'clock. Are you in a hurry?

— Thanks. I certainly am.

The opening phrase delimits a set of acceptable answering moves-: a follow-up move can do little more than non-conten­

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tiously reformulate or comment upon the answering move or ask for some more information. The choice of intonation depends on how the speaker's contribution relates to the previous message.

If no special attitudes are expressed in the microdialogues above the opening phrase is more likely to be pronounced with a mid pre-nuclear part + mid-rising terminal tone; the answer­ing move repeats the level of the pre-nuclear part + low falling or mid-level terminal tone. The second phrase may have the low rising tone. The follow-up move is pronounced either within the same level or lower with the low falling terminal tone. The addi­tion of this or that attitude may change the integrating structure of the intonation in many possible ways. The teacher must be aware of the fact that all possible modifications of intonation are inseparably connected with the particular speech situation and the attitudes expressed by the participants.

3. To convey the idea adequately the speaker must be al­ways aware of the relative information load carried by particular elements in his discourse. The distribution of prominence in each particular phrase depends upon the speaker's apprehension of the state of convergence he shares with the hearer. We said ear­lier that the physiological mechanism that produces speech, functions as a whole, and any change in the production of pitch, loudness and duration is likely to be accompanied by comple­mentary, perhaps compensatory, changes in the others. It would be a mistake to underestimate the difficulty of deciding what, in a given instance, contributes most to a hearer's recognition of a linguistically meaningful choice. Most native speakers feel that their ability to recognize what we call "prominence" depends as much upon loudness and duration as upon pitch, but a phoneti­cally untrained ear does not recognize their compensatory effect. The learner of English must be particularly careful about the dis­tribution of prominence among the parts of his utterance. It is not always necessary to make prominent notional words. On the other hand, form-words may be informationally loaded and stand out rather strongly:

— What will John do?

— I doubt John's coming.

— I think he's coming.

— But he is coming.

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This is how an interactive theory of intonation can be ap­plied in a speaker-to-speaker discourse. How, one may ask, can this theory be appropriate to describe choices of intonation made when a speaker is reading aloud a ready-made text?

We must first emphasize that we see even silent reading as an essentially interactive process — not however, between reader and writer, but rather between reader and text. Whatever text he is concerned with, fictional or factual, the reader's task is to dis­cover not what the writer intends, for that is not recoverable, but rather what meaning(s) the text legitimately allows. Readers do not approach texts without a purpose or with a blank mind. Read­ing is an active process in which they attempt to mash the new information provided by the text with their existing knowledge; writers do not write for all possible audiences but for a particular one and a major problem for the expository writer is to judge how much his text can assume as common ground — each reader will know for himself how far we have succeeded.

Given this view of the reading process one must then ask what is the role of the reader aloud? Obviously he is translating the written text into a spoken one, but in doing so he is forced to make choices in the intonation system as well, and thus add some information to the text. On what grounds does he make these choices? It seems that he has two entirely different options: he can either enter into the text, interpret it and "perform" it as if he himself were speaking to the listener, saying as it were, "this is what the text means"; or he can stand outside the text and simply act as the medium, saying this is what the text says. It is definitely clear that the first approach suggests more effect on the listener's apprehension.

We must note right here that though lexics and grammar may sometimes determine the tone choice there is nothing deter­ministic about the connection between lexico-grammatical de­scription of the item on the one hand and the intonation treat­ment on the other.

We can postulate at least three levels of engagement with the reading task. At the lowest level the reader makes such deci­sions about proclaimable and referable matter as are justified by a consideration of each successive sentence in isolation. If we take the text: "He could have been mistaken. The books were still lying on the desk. It must have been Peter they had seen" we could expect a reading something like:

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He couldn't have been mistaken. The books were still lying on the desk. It must have been Peter they had seen.¹

But if the reader makes sentence-by-sentence decisions in the light of earlier sentences — that is to say, if he incorporates the unfolding text into the "world" to which he orientates — then we might expect:

He couldn't have been mistaken. The books were still lying on the desk. It must have been Peter they had seen.

In this version, which is probably only one of several that could be invented, "the books" are presented as the reason for maintaining that "he couldn't have been mistaken", proclaim new information and therefore are pronounced with the falling tone; and the judgement implied by "must have been" has rising or falling-rising tone, as a virtual reiteration of that implied by "he couldn't". However, if the text is treated as fitting into a wid­er context — as being related, for instance, to a tacit understand­ing that "he" is not the kind of person who makes mistakes, and set in a world in which objects like "the desk" can be taken for granted — then the reading might go like:

He couldn't have been mistaken. The books were still lying on the desk. It must have been Peter they had seen.

All the intonation groups in this interpretation are likely to be pronounced with the falling tones.

This type of reading by an informed reader to an informed listener could have a direct application in foreign language teaching. One of the difficulties of reading a text in a foreign lan­guage is seeing how the individual sentences hold together and how they relate to other sentences, while one of the things a reader aloud does is to highlight the information structure of the passage. It seems to us that one could usefully teach foreign learners the rudiments of a description of intonation and then have them read following the intonationally structuring model.

It is not possible, within the limited space of this section, to give a complete survey of the most important principles of into­nation choice in other speech realizations. It is definitely a sub­ject for discussion in a special book dealing with the methods of teaching pronunciation.

But there is one more point that should be mentioned right

¹ Semantic centres are italicized.

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here. Clearly, the language interaction in which learner and teacher engage is limited by their social roles and didactic pur­poses do not give the chance of realizing all the meanings sig­nalled by intonation. Therefore teaching material should suggest extralinguistic situations in which role playing could expose the learner to varieties of spoken interaction.

By way of conclusion we would say that there is a much longer history behind the teaching of grammar and lexics, as translated into classroom textbooks and general courses, than there is behind intonation; the regular integration of it into the language training syllabuses is something that is to come yet.

It would be perfectly natural to add that the object of linguistic studies is verbal language as a communicative tool. At the same time it is obvious that although verbal means (intonation among them) form the core of most human communication situations, the total message is actually conveyed through their interrelation with systems other than verbal. Among them kinesics proves to be an essential part of the human message-conveying activities of speech and movement. Since verbal language cannot be studied in isolation, the realistic departure in non-verbal communication studies is the integration of human signalling systems.

Typically, in any dyadic conversation one person can be identified as the speaker and the other as the listener. It is gener­ally assumed that the person in the speaker role is the dominant provider of information. However listeners quite frequently give brief verbal responses. The contents of verbal listener responses can range from simple "mhm" to more complex utterances such as "I think I see what you mean". Listeners are as active kinesi-cally as they are verbally. They engage in a wide range of visi­ble non-verbal behaviours, some but not all of which co-occur with their verbal listener responses. These include occasional shift in posture, periodic changes in direction of orientation of the head and eyes, gesticulations of the hands and arms and a variety of affective (and emblematic) reactions involving the face and head. Presumably many of these non-verbal activities of lis­teners function to provide feedback about the adequacy of the presentations of speakers. However, little concrete evidence is available about the particular feedback functions that are served by variations in non-verbal responses of listeners, or about how these interact with the verbal components of listener responses. The most commonly identified kinesic form of listener responses

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is the head nod. Head nods may or may not accompany verbal listener responses. In fact they occur in the absence of any verbal component.

Attempts have been made to identify the major varieties of speaker and listener behaviours. Among speaker's non-verbal behaviours the following are substantively distinct.

1. "Active ending" characterized by the shifting of posture to­wards the listener, turning and pointing the head towards the lis­tener, small head nods, the holding of gesticulations and a clear pause.

2. "Floor maintenance" consists of turning the head and eyes away from the listener both prior to and during the verbal listen­er response.

3. "Persistent display" is comprised, of eyebrow flashes and raised brows during the end of the speaker's utterance and the lowering of brows and termination of smiles during the subse­quent verbal listener response phase.

4. "Deactivation ending" consists of the termination of smiles, or frowns, and of eyebrow raises prior to the listener response.

Among listener's behaviours the following could be men­tioned.

1. "Normal acknowledgement" is based upon a number of normal head nods during the verbal listener response. It appears to be a classic indicator of attention to, and acceptance of, the flow of the speaker's utterances.

2. "Preprocessing" is head nodding prior to the end of the speaker's utterance indicating that the listener is signalling un­derstanding before the speaker has finished talking.

3. "Minimal recognition" is composed of brief smiles and small head nods during the listener's verbalization.

4. "Interest" is based on forward posture and visual attention prior to the verbal listener response, and the initiation of eye­brow raises or flashes or blinks during the verbal listener re­sponse.

5. "Disengagement" includes both gaze aversion and return of gaze during the listener response period.

The described non-verbal behaviours and their interpretation are presented by the first steps in the field of non-verbal commu­nication where a thorough further research is expected, especial­ly in the field of correlation between the use of phonetic units and non-verbal behaviours.

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Chapter VI

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