Intonation is the melody of speech: the way pitch rises, falls, and moves across an utterance. It is not about individual sounds (phonemes) or the stress of individual words, but about the pitch contour that stretches over phrases and sentences. Intonation carries meaning that words alone cannot: the difference between "You're leaving." (statement, falling) and "You're leaving?" (surprise/question, rising) is entirely intonational.
Grammatical function: Intonation signals sentence type and clause boundaries:
Attitudinal function: Intonation conveys the speaker's attitude: certainty, doubt, enthusiasm, boredom, sarcasm, sympathy. The same words with different intonation patterns express radically different stances. "That's nice" can be genuine (wide fall), dismissive (flat/narrow fall), or sarcastic (rise-fall).
Discourse function: This is where intonation goes beyond the textbook rising/falling model. David Brazil's discourse intonation framework shows that speakers use pitch to manage information flow and interaction:
Intonation operates over tone units (also called intonation phrases or tone groups), chunks of speech bounded by brief pauses or pitch resets. Each tone unit has one nucleus (tonic syllable), the syllable that carries the main pitch movement. The nucleus typically falls on the last stressed content word, but can be moved for contrastive focus (see Sentence Stress).
"I went to the SHOP" → one tone unit, nucleus on "shop" "When I GOT there | it was CLOSED" → two tone units
Chunking speech into appropriate tone units is itself a skill; fluent speakers chunk efficiently, while learners may produce either one enormous tone unit (monotone) or too many tiny ones (choppy).
Intonation is best taught through awareness and imitation rather than rules. Effective techniques:
Avoid oversimplifying to "questions rise, statements fall"; this is misleading. Wh-questions typically fall, tag questions can rise or fall depending on whether the speaker genuinely asks or expects confirmation, and statements can rise to signal continuation. Teach intonation in meaningful context, always connected to Sentence Stress and Rhythm.