To address how a common set of acoustic properties of speech prosody modulate to convey linguistic and affective meanings concurrently, this study investigated the influence of phonemic tones on the expression of emotion (happy, sad, angry) and linguistic modality (declarative, interrogative) in a tone language, Punjabi. Base stimuli consisted of neutral sentences with either of the three contrastive tones in Punjabi (falling, level, high-rising) varying at the object position of the sentence only. Each of these sentences was elicited as a statement or a question for each of the three emotions by 6 native Punjabi speakers. Utterances were validated for adequate representation of the target emotion, and reliable exemplars for each of the emotions and linguistic modality were subjected to detailed acoustic analysis. Fundamental frequency and duration measures were analyzed for the stressed vowel of the keywords (subject, object, verb) and the whole utterance for each of the tokens. Results demonstrated ways that the acoustic correlates of tone at the word level interact with that of the intonation and emotion at the sentence level, which were further compared with previous results on the effect of focus on intonation and emotional prosody [M. D. Pell, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 109, 1668–1680 (2001)].