It also conveys information about syntactic structure, discourse structure, and the speaker's attitude. The intonation contour emphasizes certain words more than others, and distinguishes statements (with falling intonation contours) from yes/no questions (with rising intonation contours). Listeners perceive an intonation contour as a pitch pattern that rises and falls at different points in a phrase. Acoustically, this vocal fold vibration provides the energy source that excites the vocal tract resonances during voiced portions of speech. Physiologically, F0 corresponds to the frequency at which the vocal folds are vibrating. An intonation contour is the underlying fundamental frequency (F0) pattern that occurs over time in speech phrases. 'In text-to-speech systems, the goal of the intonation component is to generate an appropriate intonation contour for each spoken phrase.Intonation Contours in Text-to-Speech Systems Brazil, 'Intonation.' The Linguistics Encyclopedia, ed. The important point is that, whether this is explicit or not, each formulation amounts to a starting assumption about how the underlying meaning system is organized.'

There is a rough similarity between the categories referred to in the literature as sense units, breath groups, tone groups, and contours, but the similarities are deceptive and the various ways of further segmenting into nucleus, head, tail, tonic, pre-tonic, etc., compound the differences. 'A well-canvassed discrepancy between an American predilection for 'levels' and a British preference for 'tunes' is only one aspect of the differences that exist concerning how the utterance should be segmented for the purpose of describing its intonation. Wennerstrom, The Music of Everyday Speech: Prosody and Discourse Analysis. Should the intonation contour of an entire phrase be interpreted as a single, meaning-bearing unit? Is it possible to identify smaller units as meaningful? Where exactly does a unit start and stop?'

To make matters worse, there are even different schools of thought on what counts as a unit in an intonation analysis. Not only are the lay terms different from the linguists' terms, but linguists themselves disagree on terminology.

If I wish to talk about syntax, I can feel confident that most audiences will understand words such as 'noun' and 'verb.' However, with intonation, terms such as 'stress,' 'accent,' 'tone,' and 'emphasis' may mean different things to different people. 'One immediate difficulty in consolidating the literature on intonation is the lack of agreement on terminology.Jones, Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach, 3rd ed. (Ron Scollon, Suzanne Wong Scollon, and Rodney H. 'The reason intonation contour is so important to spoken discourse cohesion is that participants use their reading of intonation contours in deciding whether or not it is their turn to take over the floor.' Any native speaker of English would recognize the difference in meaning among these three intonation patterns, though the exact description of such contours is far from being a simple matter. In the first case, it would be given a questioning intonation in the second case, it would be said with a non-emphatic final intonation contour and in the third case, it would be said with an emphatic intonation contour indicating an imperative. 'In all three cases, this same string of words, Finish that report, would be said with quite different overall tone contours. He or she might say, 'Finish that report.' Finish that report.' Now, perhaps, the secretary is talking to his or her assistant who is word processing this same report. He or she might ask, 'Finish that report?' or perhaps the same secretary is telling the boss the list of things he or she planned to do next. 'Suppose a secretary would like to know if his or her boss has completed drafting up an important report.

Contour definition