Linguistics & Language · Phonetics & Phonology
A topic within Phonetics & Phonology, itself one of 9 topics in that field and part of Linguistics & Language.
2 works
D. Robert Ladd
Argues that intonation is not a paralinguistic add-on to a sentence but carries its own compositional meaning, built from a small inventory of contrastive tunes.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Janet B. Pierrehumbert
Argues English intonation contours are built by concatenating a small inventory of high and low pitch accents and boundary tones rather than drawn from a fixed catalogue of whole tunes, giving intonation a combinatorial phonology of its own.