The significance of intonation in discourse 45As is (25), from a newscast reporting how a Palestinian terrorist organization
had tried to invade Israel by balloon, but had met disaster when the balloon
25 // CRASHED // and BURNED //
This listener, at least, expected a low key for ‘burned’, indicating ‘as you
would have expected’.
Pitch concord
It has long been accepted that some polar questions seem to expect or even
predict a particular answer like (26a), while others like (26b) appear to
allow for either:
26a You’ll come, won’t you?
26b Will you come?
In fact, all utterances set up expectations at a very general level about what
will follow. In order to demonstrate this, we need to discuss termination, a
second three-term pitch choice made this time at the tonic syllable.
When we look at transcribed texts, we discover a marked tendency for
concord between the termination choice of the final tone unit of one utterance
and the initial key choice of the next; in other words, it appears that with
his termination choice a speaker predicts or asks for a particular key choice
and therefore, by implication, a particular meaning from the next speaker.
This is easiest to exemplify with questions. In example (26a), the speaker
is looking for agreement, i.e. a mid key ‘yes’, and his utterance is likely,
therefore, to end with mid termination, as in (27a), to constrain the required
response; (remember that key and termination can be realized in the same
syllable).
27a A: // you’ll // COME // WON’T you //
B: // YES // (I agree I will)
A choice of high termination with ‘won’t you’ needs some ingenuity to
contextualize because the conflict between the lexico-grammatical markers
of a search for agreement and the intonational indication that there is a
‘yes/no’ choice makes it sound like either a threat or a plea:
27b // you’ll COME // WON’T you //
Example (26b), ‘will you come’, by contrast, quite naturally takes a
high termination, looking for a ‘yes/no’ contrastive answer, as in (28a),
although the persuasiveness of (28b) can be explained simply as the
intonation choice converting an apparently open request into one looking
for agreement:
28a A: // Will you COME // B: // YES // or // NO //
28b A: // WILL you COME // B: // YES //