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I took some Mandarin in college and I believe (IIRC) the concept of tones was introduced to us English speakers by showing how we use "rising tone" for questions.

But a comment to a recent question asserts that mostly English uses "intonation" as opposed to tones to convey meaning.

So: Is what is the difference between "intonation" and "tones" and if so, does English use anything similar to Mandarin tones to convey meaning? (I note that there are separate tags for the two terms.)

Please give examples.

MeltedStatementRecognizing
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releseabe
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    Not in a lexical way like Chinese. But there is a lot of use of short intonation patterns, often just hummed or whistled, or placed on nonsense syllables like uh-huh. I once had a grad student in linguistics analyze the various conversational English two-syllable tonemes: uh-huh expressing agreement, disagreement, doubt, anxiety, impatience, and any number of other communicationally useful things. He got around 25 before he quit. – jlawler Feb 20 '23 at 18:32
  • @jlawler: "Lexical" means that there are no cases where a word might mean, say "mother" with one tone and "horse" with another? I actually wonder if throughout English where, at least informally, some noun or verb has an actually, if only slightly, different meaning depending upon tone. But a question changes none of the words to refer to different things, I see that. – releseabe Feb 20 '23 at 19:36
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    The general distinction between intonation and tone is that tone applies to individual words (or morphemes or similar – singular lexical items of some description), whereas intonation applies to utterances. As such, tones have the ability to distinguish lexical meaning (‘mother’ vs ‘horse’), while intonation does not (since utterances do not encode lexical meaning but combinations of lexical meaning). All languages use intonation, without exception; only some use tones. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 20 '23 at 21:54
  • I have already answered this under the other question. Intonation in English is suprasegmental and not semantic. In Chinese, tones are semantic. Different tones carry different meaning. For example, (and one often given to Western language speakers) is the word ma which can have four different tones: rising, falling, rising-falling or neutral (flat). Each one means something different. That is the simplest explanation. In English, intonation can change meaning as emphasis but not the semantics of an utterance., And I don't understand why this question is being posed again. – Lambie Feb 20 '23 at 23:09
  • https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/46145/do-non-tonal-languages-evolve-into-tonal-languages – Lambie Feb 20 '23 at 23:15
  • @Lambie The ‘flat’ (high) tone is not neutral; none of the four contour tones is. The so-called ‘neutral tone’ or ‘fifth tone’ is in fact rather a non-tone, since it is precisely neutral and has no tonal contour of its own, taking its pitch and contour exclusively from the preceding tones. (Also, your answer in the comment on the other question came after this one was posted.) – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 21 '23 at 00:22
  • @JanusBahsJacquet You know what? Please. I referenced four tones. Not five. I am not a Chinese speaker and may have not used every single term. The fact is that Chinese is a tone language which means the tones have semantic value. English words do not have this feature. Thank you. The literature says technically a fifth tone. My basic point remains: "There are four tones in Chinese, and technically a fifth tone: the first tone (high/flat), the second tone (rising), third tone (low/flat) and fourth tone (falling), and the fifth “neutral” tone (toneless tone)". See link below. – Lambie Feb 21 '23 at 01:00
  • https://yoyochinese.com/blog/mandarin-chinese-tone-change-rules-bu-no#:~:text=There%20are%20four%20tones%20in,%E2%80%9D%20tone%20(toneless%20tone). Neither you or John located the main difference between tone as semantic and intonation as suprasegmental. English does not uses tones semantically. – Lambie Feb 21 '23 at 01:01
  • Four tones in Mandarin Chinese: https://www.thoughtco.com/four-tones-of-mandarin-2279480 Four Tones There are four tones in Mandarin Chinese, which are:

    First tone: a level and higher pitch Second tone: rising, start from a lower pitch and end at a slightly higher pitch Third tone: falling rising, start at a neutral tone then dip to a lower pitch before ending at a higher pitch Fourth tone: falling, start the syllable at a slightly higher than neutral pitch then go quickly and strongly downwards

     – Lambie Feb 21 '23 at 01:07
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    Some varieties of English like South African English have minimal tonal pairs of words. – Yellow Sky Feb 21 '23 at 01:37
  • @Lambie Give it a rest. You used an incorrect term, and I corrected you. End of story. I have nothing to say to the rest of your ramblings. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 21 '23 at 01:46
  • @YellowSky: Can you explain this more simply/clearly than what I see in the link you provide? Does this contradict something others have said here? – releseabe Feb 21 '23 at 05:19
  • @releseabe - You can see there that South African English lexical items can be distinguished by tone only, for example oh (neutral [ʌʊ˧] or high falling [ʌʊ˦˥˩]) vs. hoe (low [ʌʊ˨] or low rising [ʌʊ˩˨]). It's up to you to decide whether this contradicts something others have said here. – Yellow Sky Feb 21 '23 at 11:03
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Everyone around here knows that you and one other person represent the apogee of linguistic erudition. My basic point is correct and you and the other sagacious master might consider at least acknowledging what I said about the difference between intonation in English and Chinese as a tonal language. This is basic classification. Also, Chinese has intonation. – Lambie Feb 21 '23 at 18:04
  • noooOOOOOooooo, never. – Lee Mosher Feb 25 '23 at 03:52

2 Answers2

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The question depends on two concepts: "meaning" and "tone". Tone is a phonological classification of Fo values into a small number of discrete values, e.f. H, L, Rising, Falling. It's very unclear what people mean by "meaning" especially in light of the broad "meaning" subcategory "usage", but the concept of "semantic interpretation" is much clearer. It refers to lexical meaning ("horse, mother, hemp, eat, 5...") and compositional, propositional meaning (truth values) like the difference between "I saw you" and "you saw me".

Like all languages, English modulates Fo of utterances in infinitely many ways – there aren't just a few tonal categories, analogous to the few tonal phonemes that exist in Chinese. So what happens in English isn't tone. Also what it signals is not semantics, it is pragmatics, i.e. "about how you use the sentence". You can use rising intonation to ask a question, or to fit in with a certain social group, or to express impatience. It isn't used to signal singular or plural, or subject or object, or past vs. future, it is used to do certain things with words.

So English intonation is not at all like Chinese tone. Perhaps what is confusing is that English stress functions in a manner that is weakly similar to tone in Chinese, given the difference between permit and permit.

user6726
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  • I understand permit changing based on stress which I had not thought of -- as you say, not tone but analogous. Perhaps among the hundreds of thousands of words in English, tone actually does affect meaning. – releseabe Feb 21 '23 at 05:21
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As far as I know, all spoken languages have intonation. Intonation reaches across word boundaries to affect the pronunciation of an entire sentence or larger bit of discourse. It's common across languages, for example, for questions to have rising intonation.

But not all languages have phonemic tone. Phonemic tone occurs within the syllables of single words. Like consonants and vowels, phonemic tones distinguish different words.

Here, different consonants indicate different words: dan, dam, pan, fan, fad.

Here, different vowel sounds indicate different words: dumb, dim, dime, dome, doom.

English doesn't have phonemic tones, but in languages that do, such as Mandarin, words are differentiated by tones as well as by consonants and vowels. The number of tones varies across tone languages. Mandarin has five phonemic tones: high, low, rising, falling, dipping, and neutral/unstressed.

For example, the Mandarin CV sequence "ma" denotes ...

"mother" with high tone, "hemp" with rising tone, "horse" with dipping tone, "scold" with falling tone, [the sentence-final question particle] with neutral/unstressed tone

Most Indo-European languages don't have phonemic tones, but many Southeast Asian languages and West African languages do.

James Grossmann
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  • Yikes! I forgot to cite the source of my tone examples. I don't know Mandarin, so I found the examples at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme#:~:text=Phonemic%20tones%20are%20found%20in%20languages%20such%20as,intonation%20for%20functions%20such%20as%20emphasis%20and%20attitude. – James Grossmann Feb 23 '23 at 03:53