Contrastive Study of Tone and Intonation in Koro Ashe and English

Abstract

This paper undertakes a contrastive study of tone and intonation in Koro Ashe and English; an implication for Koro Ashe L2 learners of English with the hope of helping the study populace to improve in their spoken aspect of English. The sample consisted of 20 randomly selected Koro Ashe ESL learners of English in Karu Local Government, Nasarawa State. The instrument used in collecting data for this investigation is Oral Production Test (OPT), a pronunciation test that assessed the participants’ pronunciations of Koro Ashe words. The theoretical framework used in the paper was Contrastive Analysis (CA). The results showed that Koro Ashe is a tonal language and that tone in Koro Ashe is capable of performing lexical functions as it is demonstrated in words like [ìnȧk] L-L ‘cow’ and [inak] L-H ‘sp tree’, [iwei] L-L ‘toad’ and [iwei] L- H ‘fear’. Tone in Koro Ashe can perform grammatical function, that is, changing singular nouns to the plural as it is seen in words; [inak] (L-L) ‘cow’ and [inak] (H-H) ‘cows’, [inor] ‘wound’ (L-L) and [inor] ‘wounds’ (H-H), [imai] ‘generation’ (L-L) and [imai] ‘generations’ (H-H), [iguk] ‘pocket’ (L-L) and [iguk] (H-H) ‘pockets’, [iʤu] ‘fly’ (L-L) and [iʤu] ‘flies’ (H-H). However in English, intonation (pitch) in English conveys information of a broadly meaningful nature, it can be used to express attitudes, interest, doubt, emphasis, certainty, politeness, mark boundaries of syntactic units, signals division of utterances into intonation phrases, signals end of statement, signals “old” information and “new” information etc.