Lesson Transcript

Hi, everybody! Welcome back to Ask Alisha, the weekly series where you ask me questions and I answer them, maybe!
Let’s get to your first question this week.
First question this week comes from Amidoune Mbacke.
Hello, Amidoune! I hope I said your name right.
Amidoune says…
Hi, Alisha! My question is, how does the tone of a word change its meaning in English?
Great question! Okay, yeah, let’s talk about how we use tone in English to communicate things. So, some languages, the tone that you use with the word affects the meaning of the word or maybe even changes the vocabulary word completely.
With English, we don’t have quite the same way of using tone. We can use tone to affect the meaning of our words, but using tone to change the vocabulary word completely doesn’t happen. Rather, we use tone to express our true feelings behind something. This happens a lot when we use something called sarcasm. So, sarcasm is very, very common in American comedy, in everyday speech and just in life in general, in communication in general, in English.
So, what is sarcasm? Sarcasm is expressing one idea or opinion, but the true feeling is the opposite of that. So, a really simple example of this is when someone says the words, “That’s great.” You might think, okay, this person thinks the other thing is good, right? But when someone is using sarcasm, they might use a low tone. They might say, “That’s great.”
So, in this case, the tone and the words being used don’t match, right? This is an example of sarcasm. The speaker uses their tone to communicate their true feelings. They use the vocabulary words, “that’s great” to mean this is kind of like the expected reaction, but I want to communicate my true reaction. I will do this with my tone. So, I say “that’s great,” but I don’t actually mean it. That’s not my true feeling.
So, we use tone to do this a lot. So, when we don’t feel surprised about something or we don’t feel happy about something, we might use this use of tone to express that.
So, some other examples of this might be, let’s say, for example, a surprise example, when someone is trying to surprise you with something and you already know it’s going to happen, you might say:
“Wow, I’m so surprised,” right?
So, you show that you’re not actually surprised about that thing by using your tone of voice, right?
You could say:
“Wow, I’m so surprised!” or something similar.
That shows you’re excited, right? Your words match your tone.
But if you use sarcasm, your words don’t match your tone and you say:
“Wow, I’m so surprised.”
Which communicates you’re not actually surprised. Why do we do this? This is just a feature of English communication. This is just a way that we communicate that the expectation or the situation maybe doesn’t match our true feelings and we want to communicate that, instead of just saying, I’m not surprised. So, this is kind of an indirect way of communicating that and we use this a lot in humor too.
So, this is how we use tone in everyday communication. Not to change vocabulary words and not to, like, change the meaning of a sentence so much, but rather, to change the nuance of a sentence. So, I hope that this answers your questions. Thanks very much for an interesting one!
Okay, let’s move along to our next question.
Next question comes from Harry.
Hi, Harry!
Harry says…
Hi, Alisha! What's the difference between present continuous and future tense?
Like “Are you coming?” or “Will you come?”
Okay! Yeah, let’s do a little grammar breakdown. So, present continuous versus a future tense construction like “will you.”
Basically, the difference is when the decision was made or the strength of the decision, like the level of certainty of the decision. So, in a question like, “Are you coming?” it means, in other words, have you decided to come? That’s kind of the feeling of this one. If you’re talking about a party, for example, on the weekend and you say, “Are you coming?” to your friend, it’s like saying, have you decided already, before this conversation, like do you know, right now, are you going to come? So, that’s the feeling.
The key difference here is that the present continuous forms or even “going to” are used to refer to things we’ve decided before the conversation. We’re very sure about the decision, we already made a plan, something like that.
When we use that “will” pattern, we’re talking about things that kind of arise in the moment. They happen in a moment.
So, for example, I might say to my friend:
“Hey, are you coming to the party this weekend?”
Which sounds like we talked about it before, yeah?
But a situation where you might hear “will” used as in your question is when the information happens at that moment like…
“Hey, I’m having a party this weekend. Will you come?”
We would use it there because the other person just learned about the party. They just found out about it. I just invited them. “Will you come?” is showing that’s happening now, right? I’m asking you to make a decision now. I’ve asked the question about something that you just found out about.
If I said, “Hey, I’m having a party this weekend. Are you gonna come?” it sounds kind of like, oh, like you might hear it, but maybe the other person just learned about it, I don’t know, I haven’t had time to make a decision yet.
So, you might hear “will you come” used in those kinds of situations. The difference is in the timeframe, yeah? So, has the person had time to understand the information and make a decision yet or not? As in the second example sentence, the person is getting the information for the very first time and so, the request comes as, “Will you come?”
This is how you might use “will you come” and “are you coming” differently. So, with plans, you’ll tend to hear “Are you coming?” more because maybe you invited the person before the conversation, yeah? So, this is the difference between present continuous, also “going to” and “will” as well.
Let’s look at another everyday example of this. Let’s imagine two situations where you want to invite someone to dinner. In the first situation, you invited the person maybe earlier in the week and now, you want to follow up. You might say, “Hey, I’m cooking dinner. Are you eating with us tonight?” So that shows the other person has had time to make a decision.
Are you eating with us tonight?
However, if you want to invite someone in the moment, you might use something like this to do that:
“Hey, I’m cooking dinner right now, will you eat with us?”
That sounds like an invitation that happens in the moment. The person is getting the information in the moment and making a decision in the moment. So, this is another example of how you might use continuous and that “will” future form in different ways. I hope that this answers your question. Thanks very much!
Okay, let’s move on to our next question.
Next question comes from Melissa.
Hi, Melissa!
Melissa says…
How do we talk about the ways people say things? For example in books. I see “He said…” or “She shouted…” Can we choose other verbs to explain how people talk? Thanks!
Yeah, great question! Of course!
So, we practice using “say,” say or maybe “she told me” and these kinds of words to talk about how we report speech, yeah. But we can also use other verbs to describe the way that someone expresses something.
So, in your example, yeah, “we have said” which is the neutral form, “he said, she said,” and so on, and we can also use “shouted” to mean using a very large voice. And yes, there are other verbs that we can use to talk about the ways that we express our speech. So, shout is another one, scream or yell, whisper, mumble. These are all verbs that we can use to talk about the way people talk.
So what does this all mean? So, we talked about “shouted,” using a big voice. “Yell” and “shout really” have the same idea behind them. “Shout” is used for typically, like a quick burst of sound, maybe, like “Ah!” like when we’re surprised or something. We use “yell” typically for like a long phrase or maybe a sentence. Someone says very loudly, like if your boss gets really angry about something, they might yell. So, if somebody gets really angry and say, “I can’t believe you messed this up!” it might say “he yelled” in a book. You might also hear “shouted.” It kind of depends on the person.
You might also hear “scream” or you might see “screamed” in a book. To scream uses that really, really high register, that really, really high vocal sound, when we are afraid, usually. So, like in a horror movie, when a woman is afraid, she might scream and say, “Ahhh!” Okay. I don’t wanna shout in a studio. I don’t wanna make a big sound in the studio and scare people. But to scream is like that feeling of terror, so you might hear that and see that in books.
On the other end, you might also see “mumbled” and “whispered” used to talk about the ways that people talk, such as whisper, refers to this. This is whispering. She whispered, so whispering. That’s when you talk very, very low, you’re not really using your vocal cords in the same way, that’s whispering.
And “mumbling” is speaking very low and not clearly.
So, here’s an example:
“I’m mumbling right now. You can’t really hear me very clearly, can you? I don’t think you can hear me.”
All right. So, when you mumble- I said, I’m mumbling right now, you can’t really hear me very clearly, can you? So, when we mumble, we don’t speak clearly and we speak in a very small voice.
So, these are all words that we can use to report people’s speech, yes. You’ll see this used in books and in maybe magazine articles and other short stories, perhaps. Basically, we use this in writing and we can also use them in speech, to be specific about the way a person communicated. So, I hope that this answers your question. Thanks very much for an interesting one.
Okay, that is everything that I have for this week. Thank you, as always, for sending your great questions. Thanks very much for watching this week’s episode of Ask Alisha and I will see you again soon. Bye!

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