1. Intonation refers to the musical patterns of pitch in speech that allow speakers to express emotions, attitudes, and meanings like finality, confidence, doubt, and more. 2. In English, there are three main intonation patterns: rise, full fall, and partial fall. These patterns communicate different messages. 3. Content words should be stressed while function words should be de-stressed. Rising intonation can emphasize contrasting ideas, and falling intonation indicates a sentence is finished.

1. Intonation
Musical pattern of ups and downs

2. Intonation: to express emotions and attitudes
Allow us to express : finality, confidence,
interest, surprise, doubt, joy, pain, irony,
anger, boredom, gratefulness and so on.

3. In English, there are
three intonation
patterns:
Rise
Full fall
Partial fall

4. These different musical patterns
communicate different messages to
your listener.

9. Compare the following two sentences:
“He’s 40 years old.”
versus
“He’s 40 years old?!”
Do you hear the difference?
1. making a statement, reporting a man’s age.
2. a high pitch to show surprise.

10. De-stress your function words and
stress your content words.

11. Stress: content words.

12. De-stress: function words.

15. Contrasting

16. Rising intonation can be used to
emphasize two contrasting thoughts or facts in the
same sentence.

17. Contrasting

18. Falling intonation:

20. Use the falling intonation pattern to tell the listener you
are finished with a sentence.

21. Example
“I really want to improve my
pronunciation.”
1. go up on the focus word; then
2. fully fall at or after the focus word to tell your listener that
you have completed the sentence.
3. Tells the listener, “Now, you can speak!”

22. Rising Intonation

23. Rising intonation at the end of a sentence means "I have
more to say".

24. New information
In the first sentence, the word "walking" shows important
new information.
We already know that the speaker went walking, so in the
second sentence "walking" does not show new information.
The content words that show new information,
are "stopped" and "flowers".

25. Rising intonation for the first item in the list and falling
intonation for the last.
Falling intonation indicates the end of the list.
Listing Items

27. Exclamatory sentence

28. Direct Address

29. yes/no questions

33. I’m traveling to New York today, then to California
next week.
I would love to get a Masters degree in America, the
UK, or Australia.
She prefers cooking at home over eating out.
We’ve been waiting for this moment for so long.
They really shouldn’t have gone out without asking
our permission first.
My cell phone number is (347) 555-1212.
You can text me and let me know where we’re
meeting.