Abstract
Phonetic research has developed both impressionistic and more objective means of describing the basic units of intonation. The quantification involved in the approaches based on acoustic measurements provides more detail and it is a necessary prerequisite for the comparability and replicability of the results of different studies.
In addition to having these characteristics, a proper description of intonation should be comprehensible and meaningful. This article presents a method for describing melodic contours using Legendre polynomials, which yields a few coefficients that capture the basic properties of the analysed contour (e.g. level or slope).
This approach thus connects objectivity and quantitative precision with common linguistic concepts. The article also proposes the use of Legendre polynomials for the description of traditionally recognized Czech melodemes through the analysis of schemes reported in the literature.
Further research on real material could verify the validity of these categories and the usefulness of the method itself.