NATURAL SPEECH AND INTONATION RULE PATTERNS OF SELECTED EDUCATED NIGERIAN SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH

Abstract

Natural speech patterns are the context-based intonation patterns employed by people in conversational speech. Intonation rules are the prescribed rules employed, irrespective of interactional context. However, both are not consistently employed in the utterances of Educated Nigerian Speakers of English (ENSE). Previous studies on English intonation have concentrated on its rule-governed patterns, whereas studies on the characteristics of people’s spontaneous utterance intonational choices are inadequately explored. This study, therefore, investigated the interactionally-motivated intonation patterns of selected ENSE to determine the conformity of their spontaneous speech intonation patterns with the context of their interaction. The prominence and tone systems of speaker choice variables in David Brazil’s Discourse Intonation (DI) model provided the theoretical framework. One Hundred Tone Units (TUs) were purposively sampled from the spontaneous utterances of 25 purposively selected electronic media participants (Group A, with 14 males and 11 females) and 25 Focus Group Discussion (FGD) participants (Group B, with 18 males and 7 females), respectively. The selection of the 200 TUs was based on structural types and centrality to the messages of the excerpts. Data were collected using textual analysis, FGD and questionnaire. Frequency and analysis of variance were used for quantitative analysis. Qualitative data were content analysed. The participants’ non-interrogative tone unit intonation patterns largely ran counter to DI, with 41.2% of Group A and 33.3% of Group B conforming to DI (0.642), even when they did not necessarily obey formalised rules. The participants were generally used to the rule-based “wh-” question pattern, which resulted in Group A’s 71.4% DI conformity against Group B’s 28.6% (0.106) while the overall use of the fall was 78.6%. The familiarity of the participants with the rule-based polar-question pattern also resulted in 75.0% DI conformity for Group A and 50.0% for Group B (0.334) while 60.0% of the overall DI-compliant excerpts were produced with the rise. Both male and female participants in both groups were inconsistent with either DI or rule-based non-interrogative patterns as they produced most TUs with the fall (Group A: male – 67.2%, female – 66.7%; Group B: male – 60.3%, female – 64.7%), although they had more non-sentence-final TUs than sentence-final (Group A: 1.000; Group B: 0.704). Statistical p-value, being above 0.05, showed no statistically significant difference in the means between the different groups and genders. Qualitative analysis revealed a remarkable gap between the natural speech intonation patterns of Educated Nigerian Speakers of English and their interactional context. The intonational choices of the selected Educated Nigerian Speakers of English ran contrary to Discourse Intonation. There is inconsistency in their natural speech intonational choices which follow no specific set of rules in passing messages across. English intonation should therefore be taught to elementary school pupils and learners at other levels to enhance its proficient use. Keywords: Natural speech and intonation rules, Educated Nigerian speakers of English, Interactionally-motivated intonation patterns Word count: 452