A Contrastive View of Intonation; The Case of English and Persian

Abstract

Intonation plays an important part in communicating the precise meaning. Despite similarities, there are potentially differences between languages in terms of function-intonation relationships. Adopting a contrastive analysis framework and an intuitive approach, the present study sought to find if there are such differences between Persian and English. English movies as well as the observation notes by the researcher from his years of teaching English constituted the data. Instances of one-to-one correspondences between functions and intonations were abstracted both in English utterances and their Persian equivalents. These were then collated to find the similarities and differences. A number of differences were observed in both neutral and pragmatic use of some intonation patterns. Assuming that the cases of divergence would potentially create problems for L2 learners, only these were highlighted and delineated. Suggestion is made about the necessity of including the findings in the design of L2 course materials.