Intonation, rhythm, and general "melody" of language are among the first aspects of speech that infants attend to and produce themselves. Yet, these same features are among the last to be mastered by adult L2 learners. Why is this, and how can L2 learners be helped? This book first presents the latest linguistic theories of intonation, in particular, how intonation functions in discourse not only to signal sentence types and attitudinal meanings but also to provide turn-taking and other conversational cues. The second part of the book examines the research in applied linguistics on the acquisition of L2 phonology and intonation. The third section offers practical applications of how to incorporate the teaching of intonation into L2 instruction, with a focus on using new speech technologies. The accompanying CD-ROM makes a unique addition in allowing for simultaneous audio playback and visual display of the pitch contours of utterances contained in the book. Users can start or stop the playback at any point in the utterance and can observe first-hand how such visual and audio representations could be useful for L2 learners.

Grounded in a systemic functional linguistic (SFL) approach, this book applies a contrastive interlanguage corpus-based approach to investigate the nature and role of L2 intonation and its pragmatic function in spoken discourse. The volume offers a brief overview of SFL theories and frameworks, with a clear focus on Halliday’s model of phonology and the proposal of developing a grammar of speech. Integrating a SFL framework with a corpus linguistic-informed approach, the book uses this foundation as a jumping-off point from which to explore the prosodic complexities involved in English language teaching and learning for L2 learners, highlighting its various functions as illustrated in examples from the UAM English Learner Spoken Corpus. A final chapter synthesizes these findings toward critically reflecting on future directions for the study of L2 speech prosody. This book will be key reading for graduate students and researchers in applied linguistics and English language teaching.

This textbook is an accessible introduction to discourse intonation for ESL/EFL instructors, whether practicing or in pre-service graduate programs. Because intonation is used to form impressions about a speaker’s attitude, it is crucial that instructors understand the details of the underlying linguistic system so that they can help students avoid the more common intonation-related pitfalls they experience when communicating in an academic setting. This textbook relies heavily on the Brazil model; chapters are organized around different parts of that model and how they can be most effectively taught. Readers will learn the conventions underlying, for example, how we group words in prosodic units, how we understand turn-taking cues in conversation, and how we assess whether someone is feeling angry or sad. This text features Check Your Learning sections, discussion questions, and hands-on activities at the end of every chapter. Chapters 3-9 also include a section on pedagogical implications. Some of the example sentences that illustrate intonation have accompanying short audio (MP3) files, which can be found online at www.press.umich.edu/elt/compsite/DI.

An intelligibility-based approach to teaching that presents pronunciation as critical, yet neglected, in communicative language teaching.

The book is the first to apply David Brazil s Discourse Intonation systems (prominence, tone, key and termination) to the study of a corpus of authentic, naturally-occurring spoken discourses. The Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (prosodic) is made up of approximately one million words consisting of four sub-corpora of equal size, namely academic, conversation, business and public. The participants are all adults and typically have either Cantonese or English as their first language. The four Discourse Intonation systems are described in terms of how the system works and how they are manifested in the corpus, both across the sub-corpora and also across speakers in the corpus. The book is accompanied with a CD containing the prosodically transcribed corpus together with iConc which is the software designed and written specifically to interrogate the HKCSE (prosodic). The issues raised and discussed are all of importance in Conversation Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Discourse Intonation, Pragmatics, and Intercultural Communication.

This volume provides new insights into various issues on prosody in contact situations, contact referring here to the L2 acquisition process as well as to situations where two language systems may co-exist. A wide array of phenomena are dealt with (prosodic description of linguistic systems in contact situations, analysis of prosodic changes, language development processes, etc.), and the results obtained may give an indication of what is more or less stable in phonological and prosodic systems. In addition, the selected papers clearly show how languages may have influenced or may have been influenced by other language varieties (in multilingual situations where different languages are in constant contact with one another, but also in the process of L2 acquisition). Unlike previous volumes on related topics, which focus in general either on L2 acquisition or on the description and analyses of different varieties of a given language, this volume considers both topics in parallel, allowing comparison and discussion of the results, which may shed new light on more far-reaching theoretical questions such as the role of markedness in prosody and the causes of prosodic changes.

This volume explores the elusive subject of English prosody—the stress, rhythm and intonation of the language—, and its relevance for English language teaching. Its sharp focus will be especially welcomed by teachers of English to non-native speakers, but also by scholars and researchers interested in Applied Linguistics. The book examines key issues in the development of prosody and delves into the role of intonation in the construction of meaning. The contributions tackle difficult areas of intonation for language learners, providing a theoretical analysis of each stumbling block as well as a practical explanation for teachers and teacher trainers. The numerous issues dealt with in the book include stress and rhythm; tone units and information structure; intonation and pragmatic meaning; tonicity and markedness, etc... The authors have deployed speech analysis software to illustrate their examples as well as to encourage readers to carry out their own computerized prosodic analyses.

ANTONIS BOTINIS 1. 1 Background This introduction provides essential information about the structure and the objects of study of this volume. Following the introduction, fourteen papers which represent current research on intonation are organised into five thematic sections: (I) Overview of Intonation, (II) Prominence and Focus, (III) Boundaries and Discourse, (IV) Intonation Modelling, and (V) Intonation Technology. Within the sections the papers are arranged thematically, although several papers which deal with various aspects of intonation and prosody are basically intersectional. As the title indicates, "Intonation: Analysis, Modelling and Technology" is a contribution to the study of prosody, with major emphasis on intonation. Intonation and tonal themes are thus the central object of the volume, although temporal and dynamic aspects are also taken into consideration by a good number of papers. Although tonal and prosodic distinctions have been dealt with throughout man's literate history with reference to the study of language, for example by classical philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, it is in recent decades that we have witnessed the most fertile growth in intonation studies, as with experimental phonetics and speech technology in general. As Rossi (this volume) points out, intonation research really began to blossom in the sixties with a multi fold increase in prosodic studies, reflected in contributions to the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), and in the international literature.

First published in 1986. This book presents studies of intonation undertaken from within a number of different traditions: acoustic phonetics, phonology, psychology, social psychology, syntax, conversation analysis, developmental phonetics and sociolinguistics. The studies reported are empirically based, and give an indication of the many methodologies which have been developed in different disciplines for the investigation of the nature, structure and functions of intonation.

Based on an innovative corpus-based approach, this book offers a comprehensive survey of the phonological and phonetic properties of L2 speech in English and German. The first part of the book critically examines current theoretical models and research methodologies in the field of second language acquisition of phonology and describes the advances that have been made in corpus linguistics over the past few years - in particular, the development of phonological learner corpora. It furthermore presents the first learner corpus of L2 English and L2 German that is fully aligned and has extensive phonological annotations: the LeaP corpus. The second part of the book describes the results of the quantitative and qualitative corpus analyses in the following areas of non-native speech: fluency, final consonant cluster realisation, vowel reduction and speech rhythm, intonation and general foreign accent. In addition, the influence of many non-linguistic factors, including instruction and a stay abroad, on the phonological properties of non-native speech is explored.