摘要 :
This paper investigates the intonation of imperatives, especially those having intensive mood, such as ordering and forbidding, in Mandarin Chinese.These sentences are called strong imperatives in this thesis.Grouping the sentence...
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This paper investigates the intonation of imperatives, especially those having intensive mood, such as ordering and forbidding, in Mandarin Chinese.These sentences are called strong imperatives in this thesis.Grouping the sentences by length and function, with the help of computer, and focusing on the fundamental frequency and duration, this thesis tries to express a summery to pitch and durational changes of Chinese strong imperatives.Many ideas and methods of phonological description are borrowed from Pierrehumbert's AM theory.
The results of experiments show that the pitch contour of the strong imperative sentence is wholly raised.And the raising phenomenon has nothing to do with tonal difference or length of the sentence.Moreover, the syllable with highest pitch in declarative sentences always remains highest in strong imperative sentences, and the pitch changes do not remain the same, even within one syllable.
Moreover, the results' analysis of the experiment also demonstrates that the duration of the strong imperative sentence is wholly shortened.Meanwhile, the durational adjustment of each syllable in the strong imperative sentence is comparatively shorter than that of the declarative one.And the shortening phenomenon is inevitable, which has nothing to do with tonal difference or length of the sentence.Furthermore, the longest syllable in declarative sentence also serves as the longest in strong imperative sentence (neutral tone is not included), but the durational change of the longest syllable is not the most significant.
Therefore, such conclusions can be achieved that the most significant intonational characteristics of Chinese strong imperative sentences are pitch raising and duration shortening.In order to give a further explanation to the functions of pitch and duration, a speech synthesis and perceptual experiment have been done.
Results show that both pitch and duration are influential to the imperative mood. However, the most essential element is stress.
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