Establishing Intonationally Variable Systems in a Multidimensional Linguistic Space

It is a matter of widespread anecdotal knowledge that prosodic and paralinguistic realizations vary as widely as do those of segmental systems in many regionally and socially different varieties of British English. Methods barely exist for making such knowledge precise. Our view in the present paper is that the only method of establishing variant intonation systems is from a careful multidimensional dissection of the quantified distributions of intonation realizations, and co-occurrences amongst them. This we demonstrate by analysing some of the interactions between two, three, and four of the most frequently realized tones from a total of 4066 tone units uttered in informal interviews by 20 speakers of localized Tyneside varieties. We show that though there are some cases in which the distribution of a particular tone increases at the expense of another across the varieties, not all of the dependencies are as simple as this. The stability of the distinctions between varietally different intonational systems and the factors which threaten or promote that stability are questions requiring further analysis.