In this chapter we shall consider the effect of theintonation patterns in association with each of the five main sentence types: statements, special questions (very often called 'wn-questions* because they contain interrogative words such as why, when, where, what, etc.), general questions (also called 'yes-no' questions, because they should be answered by yes or no), imperatives (commands and requests) and exclamations.
It has often been pointed out that no intonation pattern is used exclusively with this or that sentence type and certainly no sentence type always requires the use of one and only one intonation pattern. Roughly speaking any sentence type can be linked with any intonation pattern, and the meaning of an utterance will depend on the particular context in a certain intonation style.
However, some sentence types are more likely to be said with one intonation pattern than with any other. In this sense one can speak about 'common intonation' for a particular type of sentence. So we shall speak about the common usage of certain intonation patterns with the above-mentioned five main sentence types in unemphatic speech. It should be also pointed out that in this chapter only the phrases consisting of one intonation group will be described. The student using this book will undoubtedly understand that the five sentence types are very wide categories and we shall not try to define or limit them. We are only to provide examples of the meanings expressed by commonly used intonation patterns linked with the main sentence types with no reference to intonation style.