THE PRAGMATIC FUNCTION OF INTONATION IN IRBID DIALECT ACOUSTIC ANALYSIS OF SOME SPEECH ACTS
RADWAN MAHADIN, ABDULAZEEZ JARADAT

Abstract
This study aims at investigating the pragmatic function of intonational variations in a Jordanian dialect spoken in Irbid. The study discusses the intonational variations in different utterances with directive and commissive illocutionary forces. The illocutionary forces examined in this study are: orders, requests, warning, threatening and promising. They co-occur with variant grammatical patterns. The autosegmental-metrical approach which was proposed by Pierrehumbert (1980) is used to analyze different intonational patterns. The results show that intonation changes the interpretation of an utterance by virtue of its structure into another interpretation which the speaker actually intends to convey. Also, intonation is needed to determine the illocutionary function of an utterance when there is no any other illocutionary marker.

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