The importance of pitch in conveying meaning in English

Abstract

Pitch, as a basic property of sounds and an important suprasegmental feature of speech, exerts its effect on many linguistic aspects at different levels. The current study mainly focuses on its pragmatic meaning realized by phonetic forms, namely the accent placement and tune. By observing the pitch curves of various renderings of utterances from the phonetic tool Praat and analyzing these typical instances, it is concluded that pitch is of great importance to listeners’ grasp of various contexts and meanings.