Intonation in Four Indian Languages Under Five Emotional Conditions

Abstract

The changes in pitch which occur within a sentence are not hapazard variation. The pattern of variation, the rules of changes, are highly organised. Their intricacy is so great that, although one speaks his language with little effort, their analysis is extremely difficult and may induce one to conclude that no actual organization or rules are present, but that people use pitches by whim and fancy. In each language, however, the use of pitch fluctuation tends to become semi-standardized, or formalized, so that all speakers of the language use basic pitch sequences in similar ways under similar circumstances. These abstracted characteristic sentence melodies may be called " Intonation contours ", ' (Pike, 1945)