- An outline of English structure 41 (Norman, Oklahoma, 1951).
- The reverse of Pike's.
- With the exception, of course, that the highest absolute pitch possible for /4/ would not, in a morpheme embodying all four pitches, be possible for /3/, and similarly down the line.
- Op. cit. 43.
- Trager-Smith partly confirm this in the reference (p. 60) to “the scope of each of the pitch phonemes—that is, the extent of the material included under each pitch.” This does not help us, of course, as far as possible overlappings, or of possible changes of scope from moment to moment, or as far as precisely WHAT is included at a given moment is concerned.
- Thanks go herewith to Professor Fred W. Householder, Jr., who kindly worked out the graphs on the sound-spectrograph machine at Indiana University.
- The difference between the projected pitches on Š in the first and second ways is only a little over a semitone, so that there is either a change of level on both or no change of level on either.
- A was a class in remedial reading (mostly teachers) at Occidental College; B, two combined graduate-level classes at the University of New Mexico; C, an undergraduate class at the University of Southern California; D, a graduate-level class at the University of Michigan. I wish to thank Professor Charles N. Butt and Miss Helen J. Rogers of Occidental College, Professor R. M. Duncan of the University of New Mexico, and Professor L. B. Kiddle of the University of Michigan, for their assistance.
- As Pike more or less does with the profile that consists of a series of downskips.
- Several group tests with other phrases have convinced me that at this stage of unfamiliarity with intonation, self-judgment has to be based on the crudest materials that can be used consistently with the problem to be tested. It is not that discrimination is absent with more refined materials, but that to explicate it in an artificial setting requires distinctions that are relatively easy to grapple with. For the same reason I should point out that the meanings assigned to the intonations of the tests are not necessarily basic to the intonations, but may be partly colored by the verbal concomitants.
- By slightly skewing the two time-scales it was—by coincidence—possible to match the consonantal breaks almost perfectly. The figure shows the second repetition of the first way and the first repetition of the second way.
- The deviation in Group C is probably a reflection on the group, two members of which were natively bilingual. Its response to Part III is significant in this regard, differing in distribution and proportion from the three others.
- The success, for example, achieved by disregarding affective length and so identifying all instances of the word long by reason of their having the “same” phonemic shape.
- The difficulty of getting an intonation with an unadulterated intellectual meaning is illustrated in the responses obtained by J. J. Dreher in his study of intonation-transfer in language-learning, A Comparison of Native and Acquired Language Intonation (University of Michigan dissertation, 1950). Giving a group of O's a set of responses to be made to oral stimuli and instructing them to make their responses matter-of-fact, he obtained anything but uniform curves in a number of instances. The utterance That's no good, for example, had at least three contour-shapes: —\,—\, and—/ \. Clearly if one of these represents ‘matter of factness,’ the two others do not. The only reasonably satisfying solution is that no one intonation is purely matter-of-fact; there are merely feebler colorings of this or that emotion.
- Trager-Smith use the terms neutral, normal, and regular (pp. 72, 73, 75, 76; the first two in quotes) to refer to patterns of stress, and presumably would apply the same adjectives to the intonation that they are describing. The same criticism fits as to intellectual, probably in regard to stress, positively in regard to intonation. There may be a “regular” intonation by the measure of statistical preponderance, but not in the sense of neutrality or absence of emotion. From the physicist's standpoint, cold is the absence of heat; from the physiological standpoint it is an entity in itself, for the body makes certain POSITIVE reactions to it—this is clear from the resistance that the physical fact had to meet before it was accepted, and from the everyday reference still to degrees of cold—cold, colder, coldest. From the standpoint of human reactions and attitudes there is no such thing as a mere absence of something—physical non-presence acquires a positive status of its own by reason of the polarities automatically set up where there are varying degrees of something. I would not emphasize this truism were it not for the fallacy in treatments like Trager-Smith's of apparently positing a hierarchy of intonations. In order to excuse themselves from the only valid treatment of a field—which is to treat the WHOLE of it before determinations of value are set—they must erect an entirely fictitious barrier between so-called neutral intonations and so-called non-neutral ones.
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