The way in which a word changes its form to show a difference in its meaning or use.
Please have a look on this link too.
The sound changes produced by the rise and fall of the voice when speaking, especially when this has an effect on the meaning of what is said.
I was wondering whether based on provided links and definitions, we can define them as follows:
- Intonation is the ups and downs of the voice in speaking. (It deals with the whole sentence.)
Whilst
- Inflection is the stress put on a specific word within a sentence. (It is more about the words of a sentence.)
And both can change the whole meaning of a sentence.
Could anyone please let me know about my take on them.
Best Answer
You're right about intonation - it refers specifically to changes in pitch, ie. the "ups and downs" of the voice in the context of a sentence.
Inflection is a tricky word in that it has two very distinct meanings. One of those meanings (the one you've brought up in your post) has nothing to do with prosody or spoken language - instead, it refers to the way the word changes to denote its grammatical attributes (eg. say -> says to denote third person singular). As English is mostly an analytical language there are few cases where inflection is used, but other languages make heavy use of it in their grammars.
The other meaning of inflection is in fact related to speech patterns:
It's a more informal meaning, with few linguistics resources using inflection in that context, and there seems to be little agreement between dictionaries what exactly it encompasses - the Cambridge definition quoted above seems to make inflection more general than intonation and include other elements of prosody such as timbre and stress, while Oxford's one is synonymous with intonation:
If you want to be precise, I'd avoid using inflection to describe speech pattern entirely.