Intonation

Intonation is the variation of pitch when speaking. Intonation and sentence stress are two main very interrelated prosodic elements in the phonological system of a language, since the way to intone is precisely through the emphasis of stressing.

Many languages use pitch syntactically, for instance, to convey surprise and irony or to change a statement to a question. Such languages are called intonation languages. English and French are well-known examples. Some languages use pitch to distinguish words; these are known as tonal languages. Chinese and Thai are examples. An intermediate position is occupied by languages with tonal word accent, for instance Norwegian or Japanese.

The two most common patterns of intonation in English are rising intonation and falling intonation. Rising Intonation means that the pitch of the voice increases toward the end of the utterance; falling intonation means that the pitch decreases toward the end of the utterance.

The classic example of intonation is the question-statement distinction. For example, American English, as many other languages has a rising intonation for echo or declarative questions (He found it on the street?), and a falling intonation for wh- questions (Where did he find it?) and statements (He found it on the street.). Yes or no questions (Did he find it on the street?) often have a rising end, but not always.
These patterns, especially the rising intonation for yes/no questions is generally present in most languages, since the rising of the melody indicates an expectation for corroboration, but even in the case of the infrequent pattern of rising-falling as in most English statements, just by drawing a line that illustrates the “music” of the sentence in question and the modeling of the teacher would be enough for students to recognize it.

Rhythm
Rhythm involves patterns of duration that are present in speech - as well as in music- perceived by intervals. A rhythmic unit is a durational pattern which occupies a period of time equivalent to a pulse or pulses on an underlying metric level; thus languages are classified according to the tempo of their rhythmic metric level. Some languages are intonation languages as French and English where the pitch is very uneven because it is based on the fluctuation of stressed and unstressed syllables (schwa), while others as Spanish have a more even melody since all vowels are open, tense, and clearly uttered.

 If we go back to week one when we classified English as analytical and Spanish as synthetic, and we saw the tendencies of those types of languages in their phonological levels, we will understand why those intonation languages, as English, generally have a stressed timed rhythm, which means that the duration of the pulses will depend mostly on the quantity of stressed syllables in the utterance, rather than the total quantity of general syllables present in Spanish where all syllables are clearly uttered. English will have as many pulses (rhythmic units) as stressed syllables there are, while Spanish quantity of pulses will depend on the overall quantity of syllables. The following two sentences have the same durational pattern in English, because they have the same number of stressed syllables. So they last the same and that is precisely what account for the native or foreign accent in ELL’s. 

1. Dogs eat bones. (3 pulses in 3 syllables)
2. The dogs would have eaten the bones. (3 pulses in 8 syllables)

A Spanish speaker will tend to produce sentence B with a syllabic tempo of 8 pulses, which will account for a heavy accent in English.