PTLC2005 Juhani Toivanen Stylized intonation in Finnish English second language speech: a semantic and
acoustic study:1
Stylized intonation in Finnish English second
language speech: a semantic and acoustic study
Juhani Toivanen
Academy of Finland and MediaTeam, University of Oulu
1 Introduction
In spoken English produced by native speakers, stylized intonation (stylization) involves
the use of levels rather than glides. The typical pattern involves stepping down from a
steady level pitch to another level pitch. Stylized intonation contours are usually placed
at mid-pitch or at high pitch in the speaker’s voice range. Stylized intonation is used in
spoken English with such speech functions as calling, warning, reminding, etc. Basically,
stylized intonation conveys the idea that what is communicated is in some way a
predictable or routine (or ritualistic) message. Thus, with stylized intonation, it is
assumed that a part of the message is implicitly available in the context. Stylized
intonation contours often occur in “domestic” situations where the message is part of
people’s everyday activities. The following expressions, for example, might be
accompanied by stylized intonation in everyday parlance: /food’s ready!/, /anyone
there?/, and /hi grandma!/. According to Roach (1991: 140), stylized intonation typically
accompanies speech events saying something “routine”, “uninteresting” or “boring”.
Brazil (1997: 136) argues that “certain language formulae which accompany oft-repeated
business” are often produced with stylization (or with the level “o tone”): the level “o tone”
indicates that the words are “a routine performance” whose “appropriateness” to the
speakers’ present situation is recognized by both speakers.
It should be stressed that stylization is by no means limited to the general category of
“calling” or “oft-repeated business”; as Cruttenden (1997: 120) points out, stylization
often co-occurs with “teasing” in a creative way. Utterances meant to sound playful or
slightly teasing may involve stylization: /boring!/, /you’ve got a hole in your tights!/, etc.
Stylization is thus a productive category in spoken English: it is possible to produce long
utterances with stylized patterns with no restrictions on the semantic/pragmatic content
of the message (as long as the “routine-like”, “teasing” or “playful” overtone of the
message is intended, or if the message is meant to ritualistically reflect the common
ground between speaker and hearer). Similarly, Brazil (1997: 137-138) points out that
long stretches of speech, if they mark off a “piece of received wisdom” or a “definitive
expression of a truth”, are uttered with stylization; such intonation patterns are, according
to Brazil, very common in lectures and teaching in general.
2 Speech data
There is a considerable literature on English intonation representing both theoretical and
pedagogical viewpoints: the descriptive approach may be based on the traditional
nuclear tone framework or the more recent ToBI model. It is fair to say that the acoustic
and semantic/pragmatic aspects of (British) English intonation are understood quite well.
In contrast, the literature on the English intonation of Finns is very limited: the most
systematic and recent treatment can be found in Toivanen (2001). Other dissertations on
the topic date back to the 1960’s (e.g. Hirvonen 1967). However, even the most recent
source (Toivanen 2001) is based on completely non-spontaneous speech data, the
PTLC2005 Juhani Toivanen Stylized intonation in Finnish English second language speech: a semantic and
acoustic study:2
experimental design involving a dialogue reading exercise from a phonetics text book. In
Toivanen (2001), a detailed acoustic and semantic analysis is carried out on the major
tones (fall, rise, rise-fall, fall-rise), while very little attention is paid to stylization. It can be
argued, then, that stylization is the least well-known tone type as far as Finnish English
intonation is concerned. It is plausible, however, that Finnish speakers of English
systematically use stylization in their English speech, but that the non-native way of
stylizing is (semantically and/or phonetically) different from native speaker conventions.
As for the present investigation, the emphasis was put on spontaneous (or nearly
spontaneous) speech data, and the aim was to compare systematically Finnish English
intonation and native English intonation from the viewpoint of stylization. The speech
data in this project was collected as part of English conversation class in a Finnish
college (the speech data is being used for a number of research purposes in addition to
the present investigation). The test subjects (six females) discussed a topic of their
choice (which turned out to be the recent international recognition of Finnish pop music).
The speakers’ speech data was recorded directly to hard disk (44.1 kHz, 16 bit) using a
high-quality microphone; the discussion and recording took place in a sound-treated
room in Oral Communication Skills class. The total duration of the discussion (including
pauses, asides in Finnish, short interruptions, etc.) was 45 minutes (i.e. half of a doublelesson). It must be pointed out that the conversation touched upon Finnish films and
actors/actresses and other celebrities, in addition to the agreed-on topic (pop music).
The recorded speech data was transcribed orthographically without punctuation; capital
letters were used with proper names. Six native speakers of British English (female
exchange students (not studying linguistics or phonetics) were asked to act out the
transcripts in a group session to simulate conversational English; technically, the data
collection procedure was carried out as with the Finnish English data set. The British
informants took the roles of the original speakers and read out exactly the same lexical
material (excluding the remarks made in Finnish). The British informants could divide the
material into speech units (TCU’s) of they choice (see the next section), and they could,
of course, produce each unit with any intonation pattern they thought appropriate.
3 Analysis
The prosodic analysis was carried out instrumentally/acoustically with CSL
(Computerized Speech Laboratory), and the prosodic unit of interest in the speech data
was the turn constructional unit (TCU). In the analysis, it was assumed that each turn
consisted of at least one TCU, and that each TCU contained a transition relevant place.
The TCU’s were identified with prosodic and syntactic criteria: the most obvious criterion
was the presence of pause (preceded by a coherent tone unit). In effect, in the analysis,
the TCU’s were defined as tone units, and they contained, by definition, tonics; the
TCU’s were sometimes (but not nearly always) also pause-defined units. It was assumed
that there was a transition relevant place after each TCU in the turn: after a coherent
nuclear tone and possible final syllable lengthening (sometimes followed by a pause),
the next speaker could select herself. Theoretically, a tone unit is not always a TCU as it
might be difficult for the next speaker to treat an adverbial clause in initial position
containing a fall-rise pattern, for example, as a TCU: the next speaker would probably
feel that this clause is necessarily followed by the main clause, so there cannot be a
transition relevant place between the clauses. Theoretical considerations aside, the TCU
was in this analysis an operational unit equated with a tone unit.
PTLC2005 Juhani Toivanen Stylized intonation in Finnish English second language speech: a semantic and
acoustic study:3
Intonation was coded using the Brazil framework (1997) involving “tone”, “key” and
“termination”. The possible intonation contours were the following: r (fall-rise), r+ (rise), p
(fall), p+ (rise-fall), and o (level tone). So far, the Brazilian type of intonation analysis has
been carried out for tone unit segmentation and tone; features of key and termination are
yet to be analyzed in detail. The recorded speech data produced by the informants was
auditorily transcribed by the present author: the speech was divided into tone units
(TCU’s), and tone choice was determined for each unit. The f0 contour data produced by
the acoustic analysis helped the investigation when the auditory impression of tone
choice was unclear. The analysis was carried out in the same way for both sets of
speech data (the original conversational data and the simulated data produced by the
native speakers). In addition to the (auditory) intonation analysis, the average length of a
TCU containing stylization was calculated (in syllables). Furthermore, the average pitch
range (f0 range) was determined for the stylized contours: for each stylized contour, the
f0 maximum and the f0 minimum were determined, and the difference was expressed on
the logarithmic semitone scale (ST).
4 Results
Table 1 shows the distribution of tones for both sets of speech data; note that the
absolute number of tones also indicates the absolute number of TCU’s in this analysis.
Tone
choice
Data set
Non-native
speakers:
1456 tones
Native
speakers:
1227 tones
r
fall-rise
r+
rise
p
fall
p+
rise-fall
o
stylization
5.0 %
73
15.1 %
220
70.3 %
1024
6.6 %
96
3.0 %
44
12.3 %
151
25.1 %
308
52.3 %
642
7.5 %
92
2.8 %
34
Table 1. Tone choice in the speech data: non-native and native speakers.
Stylized intonation contours made up 3.0 % of all tone types in the non-native speech
data and 2.8 % in the native speech data; the difference in the absolute number was not
significant (x2=0.15, df=1, p>0.05). In the native data, the average length of a TCU
containing stylized intonation was 5.7 syllables, while in the Finnish data it was 2.3
syllables. The difference was highly significant (t=3.9, df=22.0, p<0.001). The acoustic
analysis revealed that the native speakers used a narrower pitch range with stylization
than the Finns (1.2 ST vs. 1.6 ST); the difference was significant (t=3.2, df=18.3, p<0.01).
From a qualitative viewpoint, it can be observed that, with the Finns, the stylized
contours were practically always limited to short utterances basically representing backchannel communication, such as /yes/, /I see/, /OK/, etc., whereas the English speakers
mostly used stylization in considerably longer utterances (without any restrictions on the
lexical content) to signal that a part of the message was implicitly available in the context.
5 Discussion and conclusion
PTLC2005 Juhani Toivanen Stylized intonation in Finnish English second language speech: a semantic and
acoustic study:4
First of all, it should be pointed out that any conclusions must be tentative as the native
speech data represented simulated speech material. We cannot be sure that the native
speakers would have used a similar pattern of stylization (acoustically and/or
semantically/pragmatically) had the speech situation been natural. This said, however, a
number of conclusions seem possible. Firstly, the results suggest that the Finns used
stylized intonation rather restrictively in comparison with native English standards: the
tone was used mainly in formulaic utterances or ready-made chunks (often representing
straightforward back-channel communication). The native speakers, in contrast, used
stylization in a more productive way. Typical examples are the following TCU’s, in which
most of the native-speaker informants, unlike the Finns, used stylization: /all over the
charts everywhere now/, /over and over again/, and /who wants to hear that all the time/.
In these examples, in the discussion on pop music, the common ground aspect of
stylization is obvious. The more productive use of stylization on the part of the native
speakers naturally reflects the observed difference in the average length of stylizationTCU’s between the two data sets.
The results also suggest that there may be potentially relevant differences between the
realizations of the tones: the native speakers used a significantly narrower pitch range
with stylization. This observation is interesting as the existing evidence points in the
opposite direction: with rising intonation, Finnish speakers of English use significantly
narrower pitch ranges than native speakers of English (Hirvonen 1967; Toivanen 2001).
Maybe stylization is, however, a different kind of challenge for the non-native speaker: in
contrast with the high-rise, for example, the most important thing with stylization is to be
able to produce a pitch range which is, in actual fact, narrow enough (so that the tone
can be interpreted as stylization instead of a glide).
The pedagogical implication is that Finnish learners/speakers of English should be made
aware of the full meaning potential of stylized intonation; some instruction in the phonetic
form of this intonation pattern may also be useful. These needs exist despite the fact that
Finnish speakers of English probably have an overall idea of the general form and
function of this tone in spoken English.
6 References
Brazil, David (1997) The Communicative Value of Intonation in English. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Cruttenden, Alan (1997) Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hirvonen, Pekka (1967) On the problems met by Finnish students in learning the rising
interrogative intonation in English. Publications of the Department of Phonetics:
University of Turku.
Roach, Peter (1991) English Phonetics and Phonology: a practical course. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Toivanen, Juhani (2001) Perspectives on Intonation: English, Finnish and English
Spoken by Finnish. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.