Intonation in the Grammar of English

Abstract

Intonation in the Grammar of English is for ‘scholars interested in language but not necessarily linguists or phoneticians’. It presents an account of English intonation within the framework of systemic functional linguistics, an approach which will be familiar to many readers from Halliday's earlier work on English in general and on intonation specifically—in particular, Halliday (1970). Intonation is seen as playing a role in the construction of three kinds of meaning or ‘metafunctions’: textual (which relates language to its context), interpersonal (which refers to language as social interaction), and ideational (which refers to the propositional content of utterances). The intonation system (more accurately a system of systems, in fact) presents speakers with a set of choices: where to place the main rise or fall in an intonation contour; what stretch of an utterance to map the intonation contour on to; and what the overall shape of the intonation contour is to be. These choices, in combination with lexico-grammatical choices, enable speakers to construct a wide range of meanings within each of the three metafunctions. Intonation operates over stretches of language that correspond closely to syntactic units, especially clauses, and interacts with grammatical subsystems such as transitivity and polarity.

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