1 Applications of Discourse Intonation I: Malaysian & Singaporean English Christine Goh Introduction E nglish spoken in Malaysia and Singapore 1 has a number of phonological features that are different from British English. These include variations in word stress, rhythm and intonation. Although intonation of these two varieties of English has been examined, I am not aware of much work using Discourse Intonation, except that of Martin Hewings’ on Malaysian English (See Hewings 1986). My interest in discourse intonation started with reading David Brazil’s 1985 monograph, “The Communicative Value of Intonation” and taking a course in the MA in Applied English Linguistics programme at the University of Birmingham. Later, it was with great excitement and some trepidation that I began my first study on Malaysian English. It involved planning an intervention study and eventually tran- scribing over 1,000 utterances by secondary school students - all with the help of Martin Hewings, my supervisor. That was twelve years ago. Since then I have also used the frame- work to describe English spoken in Singapore, where I now work. I find Brazil’s model (Brazil 1997) to be adequate for identifying the various sub- systems of prominence, tone, key and termination. There are, however, some special consid- erations to bear in mind when transcribing and interpreting the data. The first is the issue of whether some details in the data should be simplified so as to present them as closely as possible to assumptions in the model. The second is the issue of applying the communica- tive value of the various sub-systems to a variety of English where discourse may not be similarly organised and pragmatic intentions are often realised differently. Transcription of prominences The data I work with sometimes do not match some assumptions in Brazil’s model. One is that there is a maximum of two prominent syllables in a tone unit- the onset and the tonic. The other is that in a bi-syllabic word, only one syllable receives stress. The following exam- ples may help illustrate my point. A speaker says “In the garden” with ‘garden’ being the highlighted word in context. Because ‘garden’ is the prominent word and the first syllable ‘GAR’ clearly receives more stress than the two words in the proclitic segment, the tone unit could be transcribed as (1) // in the GARden // This transcription, however, implies that the speaker has adopted the standard word stress pattern for ‘garden’- that is, the stress is on the first syllable of this bi-syllabic word. ‘... it was with great excite- ment and some trepidation that I began my first study on Malaysian English’ ‘...phonological features that are different from British English include ...variations in word stress, rhythm, and intonation.’ Applications of Discourse Intonation I: February 2003 speechinaction.com Applications of Discourse Intonation I: February 2003 speechinaction.com