Investigation of Tonicity in British and Nigerian English Utterances
Keywords:
tonicity, utterances, intonation phrases, marked tonicityAbstract
This study examined the role of tonicity in the communication of speaker message in the utterances of native and non-native speakers of English. Tonicity operates within the context of intonation and refers to the placement of sentence stress in utterances which affects meaning. The subjects comprised a British speaker of English and an educated Nigerian speaker, while data consisted of a transcribed text of the book of Luke Chapter Six (NIV) which was read by the subjects. The Bible text which has 49 verses was broken into 191 Intonation Phrases (IPs) based on a careful perceptual analysis of the data. 30 of the IPs were found to involve the use of ‘marked tonicity’ or narrow focus (translating to emphatic and constative stress) in the native speaker’s reading of the text. The marked IPs of the native speaker were then read by the Nigerian speaker who produced only five, indicating about 17% rate. The analysis revealed that the Nigerian speaker of English realized significantly fewer marked tonicity in speech than the native speaker did, leading to the conclusion that it is not a common feature of English spoken in Nigeria. It was recommended that teaching of English intonation should focus more on sentence stress given its important role in the communication of meaning in the language.
References
Adetugbo, Abiodun. English Phonetics: A Course Text. Lagos: Department of English, University of Lagos, 1993. Print.
Ballard, Kim. The Frameworks of English. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Banjo, Ayo. “The Universality and the Standardization of the English Language in Nigeria”. West African Journal of Modern Languages 1, 1976, 93-8. Cited in Jowitt, David. “The Fall-Rise in Nigerian English Intonation”, in Ozo-mekuri Ndimele (Ed.) Convergence: English and Nigerian Languages, A Festschrift for Munzali A. Jibril. Port Harcourt: M & J Grand Orbit Communication Ltd. & Emhai Press, 2007, pp. 11-27.
Brown, Keith and Jim Miller. Syntax: A Linguistic Introduction to Sentence Structure. London: Hutchinson, 1980.
Cruttenden, Alan. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. 6th ed. London: Arnold, 2001.
Halliday, Michael A. K. A Course in Spoken English: Intonation. Oxford: OUP, 1970.
Roach, Peter. English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course. Cambridge: CUP, 1983.
Wells, John Christopher. English Intonation: An Introduction. Cambridge: CUP, 2006.
Evans, Tenniel. narr. The Gospel of Luke Chapter Six (NIV). Hodder Headlines Audiobooks. Audiocassette.
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
Copyright (c) 2026 Andrew Onoja, Obins Nuhu Isaac
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
This open-access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY-NC-SA) license.
You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
Under the following terms: Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
No additional restrictions You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
