Intonation

Wurm’s (1985) account is again based on Eastern Highlands rural pidgin from 40 to 50 years ago and, as he concedes, may not be applicable to other varieties. He describes variability mainly in terms of the rural-urban dimension, with urban implying greater familiarity with English. Wurm gives no fewer than 20 distinct intonation patterns as a result of his familiarity with this variety. These include ordinary declarative statements, and extra dimensions indicating emphasis or emotion, questions, answers and commands. There are also some special cases involving words like orait ‘all right’, tru ‘true’ and formulae such as em tasol ‘that’s all’. He notes that high pitch is the major determinant of stress, and that word stress is generally retained in declarative utterances.

One interesting observation arising from Wurm’s study is that first language speakers tend to use intonation patterns acquired from interaction with second language speakers. Wurm’s data are valuable as very little else is available on intonation in Tok Pisin. However, although the patterns are quite definitely identified, there is no quantitative treatment, or indication of how they were recorded. It is not clear, for example, whether the copious example sentences were contrived to illustrate these patterns, or were actual examples recorded in use. Thus their applicability to other varieties is problematic.

Faraclas (1989) looks at stress patterns among Tok Pisin speakers in East Sepik, mainly concentrating on stress reduction. He takes account of variables such as sex, first language and degree of education in English, and demonstrates that females show consistently less stress reduction than males, and that the amount of English schooling has a significant influence. He supports Wurm’s observations about the importance of substrate languages and shows, rather surprisingly, that substrate interference does not appear to be significantly less among first language speakers than second language speakers. Sex differences also appear to play a significant role in creolized varieties, with females tending towards English stress patterns more than males.

Smith (2002) did not look at stress or intonation in detail, but the role of intonation in discourse was commented on. For example, the use of nau to signal stages in a sequence was a common feature of narratives in the New Guinea Islands provinces:

(5) Em nau, tupla sutim nau, tupla pasim wanpla diwai nau, na tupla pasim rop wantaim leg blong em nau na tupla taitim nau na tupla wokabaut i kam daun.

‘now the two shot it, they fastened a branch, they fastened a rope to its leg, the two tied it now, the two walked down’

In each case, the word nau is accompanied by a distinctive rising intonation showing that one stage in the sequence is finished and another is about to begin, while the final kam daun is accompanied by a falling intonation to indicate completion. Wurm, too, noted the role of intonation in discourse, describing the flat intonation of orait in similar discourse sequences.

Intonation could possibly also have a role in disambiguating certain syntactic patterns, for example, the expression yu no laik paitim em would generally mean ‘you do not want to hit him’ or ‘you are not about to hit him’ when spoken with a falling intonation, but a rising intonation could indicate a meaning ‘you ought to have hit him’ (Smith 2002: 129). Relative clauses unmarked by relative pronouns may also depend on intonation for comprehension (Wurm 1971)