Word Inflections in Natural Language

[tjackson2112]

I'm curious about word inflections.  I think that's the term.  Have you heard the KraftWerk line, "When I press a special key, it plays a little melody."  (I guess you'd call it a line rather than a lyric, since it's spoken and not sung).  The first part goes up in tonal frequency, and the second part continues further on up the scale before the last word which is way back down the low tonal scale.  It's like the first part sets one up for 'a surprise', the second continues on up towards a tonal climax, and the 'little novel' ends with a tonal 'crash' or anticlimax. 

A sentence like, "When I go to the store, I usually find what I need." follows a similar but different model (wiggling around on the word 'store', 'usually' bounces up again, goes through a tonal dip and ends up again tonally.  I'm sure it can be inflected in different ways, but you get the idea.

Can anyone tell me what field of presumably natural language science studies those sorts of inflections on words and their use in language?

Thanks,

  Ted

[Strange]

In linguistics, this is called "intonation". (Inflection is modifying the word for grammatical reasons, like adding an 's" to indicate plural in English.)

There is some background here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation_(linguistics) but any introduction to linguistics (and some language-learning texts) should cover it.

[tjackson2112]

Thanks, Strange.  That's fascinating reading.  Have you ever studied intonation?

[Strange]

13 hours ago, tjackson2112 said:

Thanks, Strange.  That's fascinating reading.  Have you ever studied intonation?

No more than one needs to when learning a foreign language. For example, Japanese use pitch in a similar way to the way English uses stress within words to distinguish meanings (eg record has different stress when use as a verb and as a noun). So, sake the drink has no pitch change but sake meaning salmon starts with a higher pitch on the first syllable.

[tjackson2112]

Are you aware of any attempt to associate in a concerted way, linguistic intonation with the innate human perception of music?  Why a minor scale sound sad and a major key happy?  And other scales/chords evocative of more complex emotions somewhere in between?

[Strange]

1 hour ago, tjackson2112 said:

Are you aware of any attempt to associate in a concerted way, linguistic intonation with the innate human perception of music?

Not really. But I'm sure that song, patterns, repetition and story telling are deeply related to our language ability.

I don't know how universal the rising pitch at the end of a sentence to indicate a question is. It happens in most of the languages I am familiar with, but I am fairly sure there are languages where it doesn't (but can't give any examples).

The only thing I know of is a weird effect where a repeated phrase starts to sound as if it is being sung: http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/pages.php?i=212

You might find some other useful/interesting stuff there.

Quote

Why a minor scale sound sad and a major key happy?

I believe this is cultural. In Middle Eastern music, for example, I am told that minor keys sound happy!

This may be affected by the many different musical scales used in different cultures as well.

[tjackson2112]

The first if pretty eerie.  If I ever find the time, I'll go find one of their footnoted books.  

Sound Demo 1

[Enthalpy]

On 7/9/2019 at 4:14 PM, tjackson2112 said:

Are you aware of any attempt to associate in a concerted way, linguistic intonation with the innate human perception of music?

People whose native language is tonal (sung, if you wish) have better chances of having absolute pitch (perceive the height of a single note, not just intervals), according to one researcher
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch#Linguistics