Listing intonation in Cameroon English speech

ABSTRACT:  Compelling evidence from the literature on English intonation suggests that the tone patterns of some sentence types like lists have been grossly underresearched. This undercharacterization of listing intonation in English is inferable from the paucity of literature on this topic. The main thrust of this study is to report the findings from the auditory and acoustic analyses of the intonation of lists in read Cameroon English speech. No previous investigation has been aimed at finding out the tone types which Cameroon English speakers assign to items in lists while reading a text aloud. The analysis of a two‐paragraph passage shown to 83 Cameroon English speakers, both female and male, to read revealed that items in lists read aloud are uttered with four tone types in the following descending order of frequency: the level tone, the rising tone, the falling tone and the falling‐rising tone. These findings, on the one hand, are inconsistent with those documented so far with respect to native English varieties, and, on the other hand, have profound implications for the teaching of intonation to speakers of this non‐native variety of English.