[Link
: detailed information about pitch changes with aging]
English does not use pitch at the level of distinguishing individual vowels and consonants. In English, pitch plays a role in language only at a much higher level--responding to syntactic units, and to the information structure of a sentence.
In this section, we will start by reviewing the physical control of pitch, and then look at some of these 'high level' linguistic uses we make of pitch in English.
The pitch of your voice corresponds to the rate at which your vocal folds vibrate. If you use the muscles in your larynx to stretch the vocal folds tight, this will result in a higher pitch; more slack vocal folds will cause your voice to have a lower pitch.
Note: Some other physical factors can also impact on pitch. First, a greater air-flow can raise the pitch--which is why stress is often associated with slightly higher pitch.
Second, certain languages use special vocal fold states as part of their sound-system, and these can affect pitch. For example, Hausa (a West African language), has a special vocal fold state called 'creaky voice', and this state goes along with a lowered pitch.
Much of the information conveyed by pitch is non-linguistic.
Males generally having a lower pitch to their voice, which goes along with males having disproportionately longer vocal folds (so that between a male and a female the same size, the male will normally have longer, and slower-vibrating, vocal folds).
The rate of vocal fold vibration also changes as you age, in somewhat different ways for men and women. Disease and muscular degeneration can, of course, also alter vocal fold functioning, and hence pitch.
The pitch of your voice, and alternations in the pitch, is also strongly correlated with your emotional state, to the point that lie-detectors have been built entirely (though with questionable effectiveness) entirely around pitch-analysis.
[Link
: detailed information about pitch changes with aging]
There is a strong correlation between completion of some unit (sentence, phrase, etc.) and falling pitch. Conversely, lack of completion (i.e. where there is more information to come) correlates with a rising pitch.
One example of this correlation is in the intonation (i.e. pitch pattern) found with lists in English. The diagram below shows a diagram of the pitch as it rises and falls during the list '...large fries, big mac, coffee, and a coke.' Examine the diagram, and then answer the question that follows.
[SOUND: '...large fries, big mac, coffee, and a coke.']
What correlations do you see here between pitch and (i) non final items, vs. (ii )the final item on the list? [click here for answer 5]
This correlation between falling-pitch and-finality also applies to questions vs. statements: (i) statements normally end with a fall in pitch; but (ii) questions, which are requests for further information, generally end with a rise in pitch at the end. Most languages also have a similar correlation between rising/falling pitch and finality. However, the additional use of pitch in tone-marking (discussed in the Section 5 below) greatly complicates the issue for certain languages.
Another kind of 'higher-level' use of pitch in English relates to the special emphasis used to mark contrasting items. For example, note how the emphasis on the words 'blue' and 'car' changes, depending on what information is being contrasted in the examples below.
I didn't want a blue bike. I wanted a blue car!
I didn't want a red car. I wanted a blue car!
This kind of focus is sometimes called 'focal stress' or 'focal intonation'. It is not limited to contrasts, but includes various other relations between new and old information, and other aspects of the information structure of the context.
Although quite common, note that only some languages mark focus with phonetic emphasis like this. Many languages to not use intonation at all, and instead mark focus only with special syntactic rules, such as moving the focused element to the front of the sentence, or with affixes that indicate the focused elements. English also has syntactic rules for expressing focus (e.g. 'Now coffee, I like'), but in such cases the syntactic movement is combined with focus intonation.
[Link : Further Information about stress and intonation in English]
[Link : Click HERE to access a detailed study on focus and information structure]