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Question intonation in natural speech: A study of Changsha Chinese

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2009

Xiaonan Susan Shen
Xiaonan Susan Shen
Affiliation:
Department of Oriental and African Languages and Literatures, University of Texas at Austin, TX 78712
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Extract

Yes-no questions, when unmarked morphologically and syntactically, are marked intonationally. The intonation of this kind of question is generally characterized either by a terminal rise or a higher overall fundamental frequency (F0). Ultan (1978) found that 38 of a sample of 53 languages use the first pattern, and 18 the second. Even in tone languages, these two patterns are not unusual. For example, yes-no questions in Hausa have a final jump to an extra high level regardless of the nature of the final tones (Miller & Tench 1980); in Mandarin both the top line and the bottom line delimiting the pitch range are raised in question intonation (Shen 1990). However, the existence of a downward intonation as an alternative, for instance in English (Bolinger 1989) and French (Fonagy & Berard 1973) has been reported. Although a number of languages have been shown to have a fall for this kind of question, it remains uncertain just how the property of being a question is conveyed. This paper attempts to investigate this issue through an acoustical analysis and a perceptual test of Changsha Chinese, a 6-tone Chinese dialect of the Xiang group, spoken in Hunan. This dialect is selected, because (1) no tone sandhi occurs in this dialect, facilitating the interpretation of the F0 contours in the acoustical analysis; and (2) no empirical study of F0 in this dialect has been previously conducted. While the majority of empirical works on intonation use data collected from read speech, this study undertakes the exploration of natural speech.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the International Phonetic Association , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , June 1991 , pp. 19 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Journal of the International Phonetic Association 1991

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