Speakers vary pitch to signal emotion, questions, and focus.

Evidence

Intonation. Many phonemes have voiced excitation, which always has the fundamental frequency f0. The speakers actively vary f0, or pitch, to convey the utterance information. These variations are called intonation. It can be used for a range of purposes, depending on language, such as indicating emotions and attitudes or signalling the difference between statements and questions. Intonation is also used to focus attention on important words of the spoken message and to help regulate conversational interaction. In tone languages, such as Table 5. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 586

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines intonation as variation of f0 used for emotion, question-marking, focus, and conversational regulation.