"[…] Intonation is too important a subject to be left just to linguists. It concerns psychologists, since intonation, the least self-conscious and least commented-on side of vocal communication, allows observers to catch communicators off guard and watch certain of their inner workings. It concerns musicians who are interested in the genesis of song, or merely in practical ways of fitting song to lyric. It concerns jurists who, with their background in written law, may be inclined to take too seriously the words of a message when its tune is contradictory. It concerns anthropologists who must look at all communicative behavior as a whole and will find in intonation the spoken counterpart of facial expression and physical gesture. It concerns writers who, for lack of tone marks more subtle than period, quotation marks, and comma, must translate the nuances of intonation into descriptive words. And it concerns all those in the language arts, for whom the coloring of a phrase is as important as the phrase itself, and the mastery of a lilt is a key to sounding like a native."
(Bolinger, 1986, preface, p. vii)
(Bolinger, 1986, preface, p. vii)
Rome, Italy
