Introduction

This chapter continues the discussion of English with a treatment of its tonal structure. It is easily the most widely discussed topic in studies of intonational melody, and has been treated both by phonologists (Pike 1945; Bolinger 1958; Crystal 1969; Gibbon 1975; Liberman 1975; Ladd 1980; Pierrehumbert 1980; Brazil 1985; Gussenhoven 1983b; Cruttenden 1997), among others, and by pedagogically oriented linguists (Palmer 1922; Jassem 1952; Halliday 1970; O'Connor and Arnold 1973), again among others. The variety of English described here is middle-class southern British English (BrE). Its intonational grammar is very similar to that of Standard Dutch, American English, and North German, and is complex, in the sense that it generates a large number of discretely different contours. To keep the discussion manageable, I will present the grammar in stages. First, a mini-grammar is presented, itself in two steps. Section 15.2 deals with the nuclear pitch accents plus the final boundary tones, together referred to as the ‘nuclear contours’; section 15.3 with the pre-nuclear pitch accents; and section 15.4 with the initial boundary tones, or ‘onsets’. These three sections define the mini-grammar, whose further elaboration is the topic of section 15.5. In section 15.6, ‘chanting’ contours are dealt with as an additional contour type, while section 15.7 discusses the pronunciation of unaccented ιs. Section 15.8, finally, points out a number of cases where the description in Beckman and Pierrehumbert (1986) and ToBI would appear to fall short of the description offered in this chapter.