souls can never teach What unto themselves was taught.

 

--CRANCH

 

It must be made perfectly clear that inflection deals mostly in subtle, delicate

shading _within single words_, and is not by any means accomplished by a general

rise or fall in the voice in speaking a sentence. Yet certain sentences may be

effectively delivered with just such inflection. Try this sentence in several

ways, making no modulation until you come to the last two syllables, as

indicated,

 

And yet I told him dis- __________________________ (high) | tinctly.

|___________ (low)

 

tinctly. ____________ And yet I told him dis- | (high)

_________________________| (low)

 

Now try this sentence by inflecting the important words so as to bring out

various shades of meaning. The first forms, illustrated above, show change of

pitch _within a single word_; the forms you will work out for yourself should

show a number of such inflections throughout the sentence.

 

One of the chief means of securing emphasis is to employ a long falling

inflection on the emphatic words--that is, to let the voice fall to a lower

pitch on an _interior_ vowel sound in a word. Try it on the words "every,"