The principal functions of I. are:
1) Communicative – the change in melody/tone leads to the change of the communicative type of the utterance. (command, request).
2) Expressive (attitudinal). This functions consists in expressing the attitude of the speaker towards what is being spoken about. The ability of intonation to express attitudes is associated with tones and pitch range features accompanied by voice quality and tempo changes: John’s come. – John’s come!
There is a distinction between the attitude towards what the speaker is saying, and his/her emotional state. The emotional (physical and psychological) states are classified into strong and weak, positive and negative and they are universal, i.e. shared by all people. Then there are also conventional, culture-bound social norms which put constraints on the freedom of expression, on the ways of demonstrating emotions and attitudes. This makes it difficult for a foreign learner to interpret attitudinal intonation means.
3) Culminative – difference between the new and the given info (theme – rheme): ex.: Harrington’s the THIRD one. – The THIRD one is Hurrington.
4) Highlighting – singling out words according to the degree of their semantic importance.
5) Semantic – the difference in the meaning of the whole sentence or just one word brought about by a change in the pitch pattern:
a) She does not lend her books to anybody (with a low fall) (íå äàåò êíèãè íèêîìó)
b) She does not lend her books to anybody (with a fall-rise) (íå äàåò êíèãè ñëó÷àéíûì ëþäÿì)
6) Discourse – look at sentence intonation patterns within larger contexts in which they occur. We speak in order to communicate, and we need to interact with our listeners to do this. We must indicate what type of information we are presenting and how it is structured, and at the same time we must keep our listeners’ attention and their participation in the exchange of information. Thus, practically all the separate functions traditionally attributed to intonation (ñì. ïåðå÷èñëåííûå âûøå) could be seen as different aspects of discourse function.