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spoken language. ?1 System of Intonation ?2 Structure of Intonation ?3 Types of nuclear tone ?4 Functions of intonation System of Intonation ?As far as intonation processing concerns, there are in turn three sets of choices. They are: (1) how to break the utterance up into chunks, (2) what is to be accented, and (3) what tones are to be used (Wells 2023:6). Halliday refers to them as tonality, tonicity and tone (. three Ts). System of Intonation ?Generally tonality decides how many pieces of information in one utterance。 tonicity decides the focus of information。 and tone decides the concrete meaning of information except the lexical meanings which is decided by words. how the three Ts works in intonation system Structure of Intonation ?In a tone unit, there are words with different significance. Speakers usually want to make some words stand out as the focus of the information by adding accent and pitch movement. ?Each tone unit contains one piece of information, namely one focus of information. The nucleus is attached to the focus of information Structure of Intonation Stressed syllables in these words are the nucleus of this tone unit and they are obligatory. Syllables before or after the nucleus are optional and are termed as “prehead”, “head” and “tail” according to the traditional British approach. The most mon position for the tonic or nucleus is on the last lexical term (. content words) such as nouns, verbs, adverbs of the tone unit. Structure of Intonation ? All the syllables that follow the nucleus pose the tail of the tone unit which is posed of an unspecified number of stressed and unstressed syllables (at least of either) Structure of Intonation ?The head extends from the first accented syllable in the tone unit to the last syllable before the nucleus. The first accented syllable is called the onset. ? The part before the onset,