Systemic Phonology - Recent Studies in English - Wendy L. Bowcher
Chapter 3: Intonation: Signal of information peaks
Systemic Phonology - Recent Studies in English - Wendy L. Bowcher
Shan Zhu [+]
Sun Yat-sen University
Shan Zhu (family name Zhu) is a senior lecturer in the School of Foreign Languages at Sun Yat-sen University, where she received her PhD. She has been a visiting scholar at Hong Kong University and in the USA at Texas A&M University and the University of Florida. Her research interests include systemic functional linguistics, systemic phonology and discourse analysis. She is particularly interested in the functions of intonation in both English and Chinese.
Description
In this chapter the onset pitch of the initial tone unit in each clause of a news commentary will be examined to check whether it is also used by the newsreader to indicate a change of topic. The news commentary under discussion in this chapter, ‘China’s economic boom’, was downloaded from the website of BBC World Service at www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/ newsenglish/witn/archive_2005.shtml. The news commentary was published at 12:45 GMT on 18 February 2005.