An analysis of the use of basic falling and rising tunes in some interviews from The Ellen Show Lê Thị Minh Nguyệt Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ Luận văn ThS. Chuyên ngành: English Linguistics; Mã số: 60 22 15 Người hướng dẫn: Ha Cam Tam, Ph.D Năm bảo vệ: 2013 Abstract: How to speak English with the appropriate intonation? How to teach and learn English intonation effectively and properly? etc. They are always big questions under restless mind of English teachers and learners not only in Viet Nam but also in the English-speaking words. There has been existing a traditional so-called correlation between intonation tunes and sentence types such as Declarative, Interrogative and Imperative Sentences in the practice of English teaching. The current paper presents another effort to verify this myth by analyzing the use of tunes and the sentence types in the conversations selected from the most popular Television talk show in American- the Ellen Show. By closely examining the bulk of 872 intonation units, this study point out the dominance of falling tunes in real-life conversations. More importantly, the research results supports the correlation between certain sentence types and some specific tunes while underlines the inconsistence in the use of falling and rising tunes and other sentence types under different circumstances. Keywords: Tiếng Anh; Ngữ điệu; Kỹ năng nói; Phỏng vấn Content PART ONE: INTRODUCTION To start with, in this very first part of the thesis, the readers would find background information to the study. The historical context of the intonation issue with relevant theories and the justifications for implementing this study would be presented first, then come the aims and research questions of the study. The third part concerns with the scope of the study, followed by the methods and significance of this research. A brief description on the organization of this minor study wraps up the Introduction part. 1. RATIONALE Intonation has always been the mysterious and promising woods which has inspired a great deal of exploration, arguments and mediation to achieve a satisfactory agreement on its nature as well as values in languages. Intonation, the so-called „melody of speech‟ (Roach,2001), is „what you had when the prose was spoken‟ (Couper-Kuhlen,2007). In the past fifty years, intonation has been steadily acknowledging its indispensable roles and values in communication via the tool of languages. During this process, the works centering on the issues of intonation has recorded numerous changes from both theoretical and practical perspectives, some of which are currently far from a final conclusion. While traditional viewpoints simply equate intonation with „the use of the pitch of the voice to convey linguistic information‟ (Gilbert, 1987), the more recent and contemporary linguists argue about a far more complex nature of intonation, as Roach (2009: 43) claims: “in its broader and more popular sense it is used to cover much the same field as „prosody‟, where variations in such things as voice quality, tempo and loudness are included.” With that vivid transformation and nonstop development as well as the increasingly important roles in linguistics, intonation is currently an appealing topic for further research. It is not difficult to find that the majority of linguistics research on intonation is devoted to the functions of intonation. Roach (1991: 163) defines four functions of intonation: to express emotions and attitude as we speak – attitudinal function, to produce the effect of prominence on syllables – accentual function, to recognize the grammar and syntactic structure of what is being said – grammatical function, and to signal to the listener what is “new” and “given” information”. Crystal (1969:254) discusses the grammatical and semantic functions of intonation as follows: „grammatical considerations are relevant for the study of intonation in so far as it can be shown that a given grammatical structure has a regular correlation with a given intonational pattern, and that a change in intonation causes one to re-label (re-interpret) the syntactic structure of an utterance, no other morphological change being necessary‟. In contrast, a number of phonologists believe that this function is incapable by itself to provide adequate account for certain intonational patterns. A wide range of linguistic works (Roach, O‟Connor & Arnold, Crystal, Halliday, Cruttenden) suggest a strong tendency to have falling tone in statements and WH-questions and rising tone in Yes/No questions, but also assert that the “generalizations are too broad” and this traditional view only scratches the surface”. This controversial issue, at the same time, causes great confusion and nuisance for the learners and teachers of English as a foreign language, which the writer as a novice teacher has been experiencing. There‟s still a need for an appropriate guideline on the correlation of the tunes and the grammatical structures of utterances. This is particularly meaningful and importance in the case of EFL learning and teaching in VietNam, where intonation is an exotic concept to the Vietnamese linguistic reservoir of EFL learners as well as teachers. Moreover, most the previous studies on intonation are based on read-aloud conversations or speech, sometimes isolated utterances from official corpus (Ladd, 1985 as an example). Therefore, a closer look into naturally-occurring discourse can hopefully be contributable to the field of intonation and to the writer particularly. The extracts of two-or- three speaker interviews from the show, an American television talk show hosted by comedian/actress Ellen DeGeneres with the best-known celebrities all over the world provide the research with a varied accents and extremely colorful cultural background. The show has won 32 Daytime Emmy Awards as of 2011. The 10th season of the show, from which the selected excerpts are taken, began on September 10, 2012. In a nutshell, the significance of intonation tunes in successfully communication together with the desire of the author as a EFL teacher to obtain an empirically-driven and efficiency framework to teach intonation to her students are the justifications behind the choice of the current paper topic. 2. AIMS OF THE STUDY AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS The primary purpose and aim of the current study is to provide a closer look into the use of falling and rising tunes in the context of a real-life talk show, which would be the closest form of naturally occurring conversation. The author would like to discover the frequency of falling and rising tunes in the free-style chat show to partially establish a conclusion about the dominance of these two tones in English conversations. Moreover, another issue to be cleared out is the long-in-dispute problems of correlation between the tunes employed and different sentence types, including Declarative, Wh-Interrogative, Yes/No Interrogative and Imperative. The degree of correlation, which would pave the way to the formation of a generalization for the correlation, then is another aim of the study. Therefore, this minor research target to research questions as follows: 1. How frequently are falling and rising tunes used in the selected interviews from the Ellen Show? 2. Is there a correlation between the falling and rising tunes and sentence types at the level of intonation unit? If yes, how is the correlation realized? 3. SCOPE OF THE STUDY Under the scope of this mini study, the author would closely examine the use of falling and rising tunes as well as the relationship between the tunes and the syntactic structures of the intonation units. To mention the materials for the data collection and analysis, the author would selectively analyze 10 two-speaker or three-speaker interview extracts from the interviews with the highest viewings from the Ellen Show website. 4. METHODS OF THE STUDY As far as the method is concerned, there were two different types of methods employed to obtain the data and reach the conclusion of this study. In the first stage, the author used analytical methods to observe the intonation patterns of utterances in the extracts and analyze their functions. Then, quantitative method took over the main role in synthesizing the statistics collected from the descriptive step. 5. SIGNIFICANE OF THE STUDY Hopefully, the writer can find her own minor study meaningful and helpful, despite to a very small extent, to the area of intonation research as well as intonation as a component of English language, users-learners and teachers in some following aspects: 5.1. To the area of intonation research - To build up the enormous literature on intonation of English with another moderate empirical effort. In particular, this study is hoped to enrich the naturally-occurring discourse analysis on intonation - To provide an new evidence on the frequency of falling and rising tunes as two basic tunes of the language of English 5.2. To language user-learners and teachers Teachers and learners always desire for a guideline to perceive and appropriately use intonation as a tool for conveying communicative messages. Therefore, the expected findings of the study, the frequency of falling and rising tunes and the correlation between the tune choice and syntactic features of the intonation units are hopefully supposed to - promote the awareness of language teachers and learners as users of English about the need to understand and use these tones in communication. - offer a helping hand in deciding the tone choice as speakers and understanding the message as listeners. 6. ORGANISATION OF THE STUDY The thesis is composed with 3 main parts: Part one: Introduction states the reasons for conducting research, the aims of the study along with the research questions as well as the method of doing research, the scope of the study and the organization of this current report. Part two: Development includes two chapters. In chapter one: Literature Review, some theories related to intonation and the framework for this study will be discussed. Then, the previous research related to intonation would be reviewed in order to show the research gap and the need to conduct this work. The second chapter- The study is the main core of this research paper. There are two sections: Methodology and Data Analysis & Discussion. Section 1- Methodology once again highlights the research questions. The data collection description and procedure are discussed in detailed here, followed with the analytical framework for the current study. Section 2: Data Analysis & Discussion presents the research results which include the frequency of falling and rising tunes in the corpus of the interview extracts and the correlation between these two tunes with the syntactic structure of the utterances. In this chapter, the researcher also discusses the answers to the posed research questions and provides a comparison between the findings of the current study with the previous study. 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Chuyên ngành: English Linguistics;. importantly, the research results supports the correlation between certain sentence types and some specific tunes while underlines the inconsistence in the use of falling and rising tunes and other. Under the scope of this mini study, the author would closely examine the use of falling and rising tunes as well as the relationship between the tunes and the syntactic structures of the intonation