2.3
Description of Intonation by David Brazil
David Brazil’s approach to intonation is based on the belief that ‘the communicative
value of intonation is related to the purpose that a particular piece of language is
serving in some ongoing, interactive event’ (Brazil 1995a: 240). The key concepts of
his intonation system are the context of interaction, including the present state of
convergence or divergence of an ongoing speech event, and the role-relationship
between the speaker and the listener. He identifies four meaningful choices in the
intonation system: ‘tone unit’, ‘prominent syllables’, ‘tone’, and ‘key/termination’.
The relationship between the four elements is that prominence fixes the domain of the
three variables of tone and key or termination, all of which contribute to the
communicative value of the tone unit (Brazil 1997). Intonation represents the
existential context that projects the role-relationship and the state of convergence
between the speaker and the listener.
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