Volume 34, Issue 2

Argument: intonation is not additional, but essential to the composition of texts. Motivation: even pathological (written) texts can be made to sound normal when read with a good intonation; even well-formed (written) texts cannot be put across when read with a poor intonation; loss of intonation, in aphasia, is coupled with inability to handle texts, and inversely. Theory: intonation is analysed either as phonological pattern or as a constituent of texts. The lexical meaning of intonations (such as question, statement) is spurious; social tradition makes available certain (spoken) rhetorical topoi for use in standard situations; their use ensures textual meaning. It is not predictable in any given instance.

The experiment reported here is a perceptual study of the six contrastive tones of Cantonese. The monosyllable [jλu] was synthesized, and a large number of closely spaced Fo contours were applied to it. Listeners were asked to identify each synthetic stimulus as one of six Cantonese words which all have the segmental shape [jλu] and differ only in tone. The response data were used to compare two impressionistic accounts of the tonal distinctions and determine which reflects actual Fo more accurately. In general, the results accord fairly well with straightforward predictions made from the impressionistic accounts, but there is one major exception. It appears that something in addition to differences in Fo is involved in distinguishing the low-low tone from the other tones.

Based on the recent developments of the distributional calculus of Harary and Paper, a method is proposed to discover the constructional mechanism underlying the phonemic distribution of a language. The phonemes are classified hierarchically and the mutual interdependence of their distributional characteristics is studied. To this end, the technics of correlation and regression are being used. In this way, a ‘typology’ of phonemes in the sense of Hempel and Oppenheim is arrived at.