Watt, Dominic

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This is a repository copy of Talk of the tone.White Rose Research Online URL for this paper:https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/100936/Version: Published VersionArticle:Watt, Dominic orcid.org/0000-0003-0978-9282 (2016) Talk of the tone. Babel. pp. 25-28. ISSN 2051-7297 eprints@whiterose.ac.ukhttps://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. Pull-out English tone“Don’t talk to me in that tone of voice!”Some variant of this phrase will be all too familiar to most readers: it’s a time-honoured rebuke that every parent can deploy when dealing with an obstinate youngster. It is equally useful to schoolteachers wishing to warn a defiant pupil that some disciplinary line has just been crossed. But what do they mean by that tone of voice? What is ‘tone of voice’ anyway?When we talk of tone in linguistics, we could be referring to several things. We might mean the general tenor or mood of a conversation; we could say, for instance, ‘Veronica’s always lowering the tone with those smutty jokes’, or ‘The tone of the meeting became more conciliatory after the sandwiches were passed round’. We might suggest that a colleague ‘tone down’ an email intended for her boss, so that it ‘strikes the right tone’. As these last examples show, we use ‘tone’ to refer to written as well as spoken communications.Tone also refers to modulations to the pitch of a speaker’s voice that denote distinctions in word meaning: this is lexical tone, of the sort used in Chinese, Thai, Panjabi, Yoruba, and thousands of other languages of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. For instance, in Hong Kong Cantonese, with its six contrastive tones, the syllable [si] can mean silk, try, matter, time, history, or city. Challenging as these contrasts are to learn, we should remember that lexical tone is the norm for human languages: the majority of them – perhaps seven in ten – make use of it.Although as English speakers we can’t make radical changes to the literal meanings of words via pitch modifications, as per Cantonese, we do use pitch to signal ‘affect’ (attitude, stance, etc.). Suppose that while you’re away on holiday your flatmate calls to say that in your absence he has called in the decorators to give the apartment a makeover. In response, you say, ‘Oh’. The intonation pattern you impose on this syllable could indicate an attitude ranging from annoyance or dismay to scepticism, weary resignation, inquisitiveness, surprise, or delight.A good deal of information can be communicated just by modifying the pitch pattern on a syllable lasting mere milliseconds, but things become more complicated over longer stretches of speech. Our utterances can be broken into tone groups or tone units, each with its own tonicity expressed using different ‘tunes’. Each tone unit contains a tonic syllable or ‘nuclear tone’, which is prominent relative to the rest of the tone unit. A sentence’s implicature can change markedly just by shifting the tonic syllable around: consider the different nuances of meaning created by repositioning the tonic syllable within the phrase Jeremy always bakes us macaroons. As listeners we are exquisitely attuned to what can be inferred on the basis of these subtle changes in the speed of vibration of the talker’s vocal folds.There is more to ‘tone of voice’ than just pitch, however. We also need to take account of voice quality. There are two key elements here: phonation type and articulatory setting. The first of these refers to the type of voicing being used, but it is not only the speed of the phonatory cycle – the alternating opening and closing of the vocal folds – that is of interest, but also how the folds are vibrating. The speaker may be using ‘creaky’ voice, in which the vocal folds are held stiffly such that the breath can only pass between them in a slow, irregular way, creating a sound like a creaking door. The listener may form the impression that the talker is tired, bored, very relaxed, or suffering from a sore throat, but this does not stop creak (a.k.a. vocal fry) being used by speakers who are none of these things. It’s a stereotyped speech habit of Californian ‘Valley Girls’, but is also common among British people, particularly young middle-class women.The use of breathy voice is also characteristic of many speakers, again especially female ones, in whose speech it is often said to evoke ‘sexiness’. Continued on page 28Talk of the toneFeature English toneIn this issue’s pull-out, Dominic Watt discusses the notion of tone of voice, and the phonetic features that contribute to this rather hard-to-pin-down aspect of our speech. Babel The Language Magazine | May 2016 25Articulatory setting The way in which we habitually position our speech organs while we talk is known as articulatory setting. The configurations of our active articulators, i.e. the ones we can move during speech articulation (the lips, tongue, velum/soft palate, lower jaw, pharynx walls, and larynx), give our  voices a characteristic timbre. The speech of two people with similar accent backgrounds – even identical twins – can sound different by virtue of the ways in which they use articulatory settings. One might tend to raise her larynx, protrude her jaw slightly, and talk with a fronted tongue body, while the other might produce a more velarised and nasalised voice quality owing to tongue body retraction and habitual lowering of the soft palate.Voice quality and tone of voice One of the many ingredients of ‘tone of voice’ is voice quality. As listeners we infer a great deal about the speaker’s mood, attitude, and physical state (e.g. fatigue, stress, general health) from his/her voice quality, and also use it when making judgments about the speaker’s age, social class, or sexual orientation. It’s also implicated when we judge a speaker’s sincerity, though so far we haven’t been able to identify whether there is a consistent set of voice features associated with deceit.lowered velum (nasalised voice)raised velum(denasalised voice)expandedpharynxlarynx positionmandibular (jaw)loweringraisedvelarisedneutralrounded and/or protruded lipstongue body positionpalatalisedneutrallowerednasal cavityPull-out poster voice quality: the basics26 Babel The Language Magazine | May 2016Simplified diagrams of the vocal folds and glottis (the gap between the folds), as though seen from above, during the production of different types of phonation. The dashed lines indicate the extent of vocal fold movement, while the arrows show the directions in which they are stretched or compressed. Modified from Daniloff (1985). Phonation  Phonation refers to the way in which the vocal folds in the larynx generate sound as input to the speech production mechanism. Most of the time we use modal voice (ordinary, everyday voicing), which is made by the vocal folds vibrating in a regular wave-like way along their entire length. Creak, as the name suggests, is less regular than modal voice: the vibrations of the folds are slower and bursts of air are emitted through a small opening between them. In breathy voice, the edges of the folds vibrate but there is constant turbulent leakage of air, creating a ‘hissing’ quality. In whisper the folds are held apart in such a way that still more turbulence is produced. Voicelessness is an absence of phonation: air passes from the lungs into the throat cavity in a smooth and unimpeded way. Possible combinations are shown in the above diagram. VOICELESSWHISPERfrontbackBREATHYCREAKMODALPhonation types  Whisperfalsetto creakwhispery falsettowhispery creaky falsettowhispery creakwhispery creaky voicewhispery voicecreakyfalsettocreakyvoicebreathyvoicebreath nil phonationmodal voiceVoicing VoicelessnessHow different sorts of phonation may be combined (from Laver 1994)27Babel The Language Magazine | May 2016Pull-out English toneContinued from page 25 …  Here, the vocal folds never close together completely during the phonatory cycle, such that air is always flowing between them. We also encounter falsetto phonation – a high-pitched, Mickey Mouse-like quality that helps to communicate humour or indignation – and harsh voice, which, as the name suggests, may give the impression of vocal strain on the speaker’s part, and of emotions such as anger or aggression. Certain combinations of phonation types, such as harsh creak, are also possible.Articulatory setting, by contrast, is to do with how the supralaryngeal (‘above the larynx’) speech organs are configured over longer stretches of speech. Habitual lip rounding, for example, makes a talker sound noticeably different from one who favours a spread-lip setting. A denasalised voice (think of Ed Miliband, the former British Labour Party leader) is one where the velum (soft palate) isn’t lowered enough to allow nasal airflow, meaning that /n/ and /m/ sound like /d/ and /b/, respectively. The opposite of this is nasalised voice, whereby the velum is kept abnormally lowered. American English is often said to be more nasalised than British English. Speakers might favour a palatalised tongue body, giving a ‘brighter’ overall timbre to the voice, or a velarised tongue position, which sounds ‘darker’ (think of the difference between ‘clear’ and ‘dark’ /l/, as in ‘lap’ vs. ‘pal’, and then try to extend the ‘darkness’ of dark /l/ across all the other vowels and consonants in a longer phrase).In a study I published with Juliet Burns, we asked phonetically untrained listeners to describe a series of voice samples. They heard recordings of the same talker (John Laver) uttering the same sentence in the same accent – Received Pronunciation – but using a range of voice qualities. Their descriptions of the samples varied hugely with changes in Laver’s voice quality. On hearing his modal voice, the listeners chose adjectives such as ‘authoritative’, ‘clever’, ‘soothing’, ‘pleasant’ and ‘sincere’, but after Laver switched into whispery creak, they opted for labels like ‘menacing’, ‘scary’, ‘conspiratorial’, ‘ominous’, ‘pervert’, ‘threatening’, and ‘horror movie’.Variations in tone of voice can, then, drastically alter listeners’ perceptions of the talker. The current US presidential hopefuls, and their image experts, should keep this in mind. Much of the media commentary on Hillary Clinton’s public appearances has focussed upon her ‘shrill’, ‘shouty’ tone of voice, a trait seen as potentially damaging to her White House prospects. Trump and his Republican rivals fare no better: David Givens, of the Center for Nonverbal Studies, describes the candidates’ vocal tones as ‘uniformly angry, aggressive and dyspeptic’. When presentation and image are so vital to winning votes, sounding persuasive and states(wo)manlike becomes tricky if the tone of voice is wrong. Having learned from our experiment with the Laver samples, let’s conclude with some advice to anyone seeking to attain the highest offices of power. Unless you have laryngitis, avoid whispery creak! ¶Find out moreBooksAlan Cruttenden (1997) Intonation, 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press.David Crystal (1975) The English Tone of Voice: Essays in Intonation, Prosody and Paralanguage, Arnold.John Laver (2009) The Phonetic Description of Voice Quality, Cambridge University Press.John Wells (2006) English Intonation: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press.Onlinewww.affective-sciences.orgwww.center-for-nonverbal-studies.orgClaire Cain Miller (2016) Measuring Trump’s language: Bluster but also words that appeal to women in the New York Times, March 14th goo.gl/5Uzvr1Frida Ghitis (2016) The “shrill” smear against Hillary Clinton in CNN News, 8th February goo.gl/NRgE4bDominic Watt and Juliet Burns (2012) Verbal descriptions of voice quality differences among untrained listeners in York Papers in Linguistics (12a, pp. 1–28) http://goo.gl/3ciC7tDominic Watt is Senior Lecturer in Forensic Speech Science at the University of York. His research interests are in forensic phonetics, sociophonetics, and language and identity studies.Babel The Language Magazine | May 201628Feature English tone

Talk of the tone

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Talk of the tone

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