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Today, I did a search on the tag tone because I wanted to see if anyone had asked questions regarding the tone of a written passage. Instead, and rightly so, I saw some questions dealing with vocal tone in languages where intonation plays an important role such as Chinese. How do we deal with this on Linguistics or how has it been dealt with on other SE sites?

If there is another term I should be searching for my definition of tone, please tell me so I can learn something. I don't think I meant sentiment but rather tone which goes beyond sentiment.

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    As far as I'm aware, in linguistics the word 'tone' is only used to refer to the use of pitch to signal lexical or grammatical meanings. I think the linguistic term you're looking for might be affect.
    – Gaston Ümlaut
    Apr 25, 2013 at 8:29

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When we have something ambiguous like that, have the tag wiki explain clearly which meaning a tag is supposed to be, and point to the other tag.

In this case, the pitch sense is the most common one in linguistics, and thus should get the tag. In the sense of the speaker's attitude in a work of literature, perhaps use .

When there are two meanings of similar prevalence, if necessary we could move both to more specific tag names (e.g. and ), and blacklist the ambiguous name. (Not needed here.)

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    Clearly, the literary tone is a metaphor, and a pretty vague one at that. Audible tone is the real thing, and an important concept in scientific linguistics. I wouldn't use the word tone for anything literary unless I could provide a definition for it that anyone could measure; since I can't, I don't.
    – jlawler
    May 17, 2013 at 0:06

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