Re:Homework2: Data and anaysis of STRESS & INTONATION

Thanks, Minkyeong! I'm responding to last weeks homework tomorrow; I have a lot of undergrad stuff to do today. But I want to leave some comments on your (pioneering!) analysis for other people who haven't tackled it yet.   First of all, I think that when you say "mistake" or "right" or "wrong", you are implicitly if not explicitly invoking the idea of rules.   It seems to me that the essential nature of language is freedom and creativity. So I don't really think ANY linguistic phenomena can be said to be ESSENTIALLY rule bound.   Phonology for example varies continuously with geographical region and class. Vocabulary varies with metaphors (and of course names and terminology). Grammar varies with style, and so called "grammar rules" are really just a particular kind of upper class native speaker style.   Intonation and stress are an almost perfect example of this essential freedom and creativity. So you are RIGHT--there is no MISTAKE when the non-native intonation disagrees with the native. Instead, there is an OPPORTUNITY, a chance to discover WHY there is disagreement and to CHOOSE which form is pedagogically more useful. That was the whole point of this exercise!   Stressed words are in red. Sentence intonation is indicated by arrows. T: Next picture! ↓ Everyone~! ↑(“자, 읽어볼까요?”하는 듯한 억양) Ss: Who is he? ↓ T: Who is HE? ↑  Now, look at the picture. ↓ Ss: ... 아!! ↓ T: Stand up! ↓ S: He is 강호동. ↓ T: Wow, you're right. ↓    Everyone, please answer. ↓ "Who is he?" ↓ Ss: Who is he? ↓ T: No no no.. Answer. ↓ Answer. ↓ Ss: 아아... ↓ T: Who is he? ↓ Ss: He is 강호동. ↓   Although there are no RULES per se, we can make some generalizations.     a) A lot of Minkyeong's utterances, for example ("LOOK at the picture. Stand UP. ANswer.") are COMMANDS. In a command, the stress is always SOMEWHERE in the verb phrase, but if there is a preposition without an object ("Stand UP" "Sit DOWN") then the preposition DOES take stress. In fact, according to Halliday, that's why English puts prepositions at the ends of sentences!   Sit DOWN. Take a BREAK. Go for a WALK.   In all these expressions, putting stress at the END makes it more striking. But verbs don't usually come at the ends of English sentences. So we reformulate them to stress the ending.   b) Minkyeong stresses content words and "trouble" words to make them salient, EVEN when they are near the beginnign of a sentence ("WHO is he?")   c)  Minkyeong uses UP intonation to "rewind" and go backwards in discourse ("WHO is he?")   All of these uses of intonation are, as she says below, PEDAGOGICAL--they make Minkyeong's voice into a more effective teaching tool!      Seong-eun and I were discussing the stress and intonation that we Korean teachers seem to have when we conduct English lessons. How they are different from those of native speakers and why. I cannot say that this is universal to all Korean English teachers, but I do often find myself having an interesting intonation when saying common greetings and check-up questions. For example, it happened again today while I was greeting students at the beginning of the lesson which isn't recorded but I was sure I had said something awkwardly.   I said, "Good morning! How are you guys?" Here, 'you guys' went up high as if I was asking them “여러분 어때요?” in Korean.   Vygotsky says that in foreign language teaching we often map foreign language words onto native language meanings--that would be foreign language vocabulary onto native language tunes. But of course the Irish people are also native speakers of English, and they would also use an UP intonation on a yes/no question.    I know in theory or rule that 'you guys' in this case has to go down, but for some reason the Korean accent is stuck in my brain so I keep doing this.   No, it only goes DOWN for native speakers of British or white American English. Black English and Australian English, New Zealand English, Indian English and Irish English all have different intonational rules. Of course, there ARE universal principles (not rules) underlying intonation in all these kinds of English. But they are the SAME kinds of rules we find in Korean.   What are we to make of these apparent language universals? I just spent a couple of days listening to Leonard Bernstein lecture on the  phonology, syntax and semantics of MUSIC composition. He uses a Chomskyan theory of independent modules...and as a result he NEVER EVEN CONSIDERS the obvious link between music and language, namely RHYTHM and MELODY!    I remember a few incidents where I was very aware of my mistake(?), so I deliberately said "How are you?" with 'you' way down. The result? Students didn't seem to respond to it that well either because I appeared a bit less natural saying it or because they didn't process it as a question. Then, I would go back to my usual intonation and say "Come on. How are you?" with 'you' up, and to my surprise, students seemed to respond more. Is it merely my imagination? I doubt it.   No, I don't think so. And I think this general principle of using Korean nuances with English language is quite widespread; we find it with vocabulary (for example, if you say "audition" or "avatar" in a Korean way, even third graders will understand it, but if you say in the American way, not even sixth graders can), and with grammar (for example, Koreans do not pay attention to the degree of specificity indicated by articles because they largely don't need to).   The rule of thumb about the intonation in the English questions is that Wh- questions for new information goes down and Wh-questions for old information goes up.   Yes, that's so. But this in turn is simply a much more general PRINCIPLE (not a rule) about how information is organized in a sentence, with OLD information near the BEGINNING of a sentence, and NEW information near the END of a sentence. Most sentences, as we can see from Minkyeong's data, go down, and the reasons for this are physiological rather than linguistic. As the air pressure in the lungs goes down, the frequency of the vocal cords decreases too.    I wonder if this rule applies the same way to the Korean questions. Is there a possibility that Korean students process English questions in the viewpoint of how Koreans intones certain sentences?    The general PRINCIPLE certainly applies to Korean questions:   a) there are more sentences that go down than up b) new information tends to go near the end of a sentence rather than towards the beginning (there is a special particle, 은/는, which must be used if a speaker wants to put new information at the beginning of a Korean sentence). c) Questions that ask for repetition tend to go up and not down   Bravo, Minkyeong--thanks again!