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94 RM-MLA Bulletin September 1967 INTONATION PATTERNS AND MODALITY Gilbert W. Stevenson Gilbert W. Stevenson (Visiting Professor of Linguistics, University of Wyoming ), majored in English at Yale where he studied linguistics under Sturtevant and Sapir. Linguistics has been an accompaniment of a career in engineering and technical writing. He belongs to the Linguistic Society of America, the Association for Machine Transhtion and Computational Linguistics, and the Institute of Environmental Sciences. Anglo-Saxon, like most of the older Indo-European languages, had an elaborate inflectional system. These inflections expressed grammatical concepts like gender, number, attribution, instrumentality , and tense, as well as such syntactic relationships as that prevailing between a verb and its complement or a modifier and its head. In common with most Indo-European languages, AngloSaxon also had verbal inflections for mood. Mood might be defined as that feature of an utterance which indicates the speaker's attitude toward its subject matter, or the nature of his interest in what he is saying. Webster's Third calls it "a distinction of form in a verb to express whether the action it denotes is conceived as fact or in some other manner (as command, possibility, or wish)." The Pei-Gaynor Dictionary of Linguistics defines mood as "one of the variations employed in the conjugation of a verb to express the manner or form in which the action or state denoted by the verb is performed or exists. M. H. Weseen (Croweïïs Dictionary of English Grammar) calls it "the psychological aspect of an assertion." Typical Indo-European moods are indicative , imperative, optative, subjunctive , and conditional. Such varied languages as Persian, Icelandic, Greek, Irish, Sanskrit, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, and Hittite have all indicated at least two of these moods by distinctive inflections. English, however, no longer has modal inflections, but modality is still with us. How does our present highly analytic language express it? Periphrastic verb forms, of course, have taken on much of the job. Potential and conditional moods, for example , are expressed with the aid of auxiliaries like "might" and "would." Other modal functions have been assumed by the intonation patterns and it is the contention of this paper that the principal functions of intonation patterns in English is modal rather than lexical, syntactic , or paralinguistic. To define terms: The paralinguistic features of speech are those qualities of the speaker's voice which tell things about him that have nothing to do with what he is saying. They tell such things as the age, sex, state of health, or personality of the speaker and possibly where the speaker is from. They enable a listener to recognize a friend's voice over the telephone, but they are features of the speaker's manner of talking and not of the structure of English. Intonation patterns in English consist of variations in stress, pitch, and the pauses—real or fancied—between words or word groups, that linguists call "junctures ." Individual stresses, pitches and junctures are usually referred to as "suprasegmental phonemes" in contrast to the segmental phonemes (vowels and consonants ) of which we construct morphemes and words. The intonation pattern of an utterance is made up of these suprasegmental phonemes and constitutes a morpheme affecting what the utterance means. A long sentence may contain several such morphemes. Unlike paralinguistic features of speech, they are part of the structure of English. But what part of it are they? It is only occasionally that variations of stress or pitch affect the meanings of individ- Intonation Patterns 95 ual words in English. There are, of course, a number of two-syllable words which can be converted from nouns into verbs by shifting the primary stress, as: NOUNVERB contractcontract interniniern permitpermif convertconvert and several others. This shift of stress functions like a derivational suffix in these cases, but stress and pitch are not universal lexical features of English in the sense that the Chinese pitch phonemes are lexical features. Another lexical use of intonation patterns can be seen in these utterances: "He lives in the old green house." (a house painted green) "He lives in the old Green house." (owned by the Green family) "He lives in the old greenhouse." (a glassed-in enclosure for growing...

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