Section Two concentrates on developing a semantic model of intonation, i.e. providing an initial account of meaning often attributed to intonation. Watt here advances his view that intonational meaning can be derived both from phonological contrasts of tone and tonicity and from the phonetic gradience characteristic of these contrasts. As members of a speech community, we make inferences about what is meant both by what is said and how it is said. Watt refers to Halliday, who stresses the ideation function of intonation, how it highlights information for specific attention, i.e. given vs. new, also fresh vs. contrasted. The stressing of new information is an outcome of 'speaker assessed importance'.
Intonation adds information to disambiguate speech function.
Watt points out that a major difficulty of doing description of intonation is the inherently gradient characteristic of the spoken medium. There is a gradient between the linguistic and the paralinguistic, as well as a division between what constitutes a linguistic contrast and what signals a modification of the phonological cline within that contrast. The more we magnify the field under scrutiny, in the hopes of reaching an explanation of its details, the more we find new and unexpected details in need of explanation. He believes that accurate synthesizing of intonations may possibly add to our knowledge about our auditory perceptions, and that can also help further develop our models of synthesized speech. Yet one has the feeling that much is being said in this motley collection of ideas, observations, and analyses, much more than in many other of the works on intonation available.