The Phonology of Tone and Intonation (Research Surveys in Linguistics)

Using examples from a wide variety of languages, this book reveals why speakers vary their pitch, what these variations mean, and how they are integrated into our grammars. All languages use modulations in pitch to form utterances. Pitch modulation encodes lexical tone to signal boundaries between morphemes or words, and encodes intonation to give words and sentences an additional meaning that isnt part of their original sense.