Chapter One INTRODUCTION
1.1 Motivation of the Study
Prosody is one of the basic aspects of phonetic study, which is the structuremade up from the different constituents inside of the utterance (Beckman & Edwadrs,1994). Prosodic features can also be called the suprasegmental features, and theymainly refer to the features of pitch, duration and intensity of the utterance. Thechanging of prosodic features helps listeners better understand the meanings ofspeakers. Speakers’ mood, attitude, sentimental color, individual styles are thusmanifested in the prosodic features of utterance so that the prosodic features ofsyllables in the utterance will get changed.Prosody can not only distinguish the meanings but also change the effect ofutterance. Tao, J.H and Cai, L.H. et at. (2001) hold that rhythm, which is an importantprosodic feature, has a big impact on the degree of naturalness and intelligibility.Prosody is manifested through the effect of combination of weak and strong syllablesand some information about prosodic phrases, which mens that the prediction of weakand strong syllables and boundary of prosodic phrases is important in the prosodicmodel perceived by listeners.For decades, the teaching of English as a foreigh language in China has mainly been focusing on grammar, lexical words and phrases, the understanding and writingof passages and so on. Even the oral English classes concentrate on helping studentsin learning the pronunciation of words and phrases, without paying much attention tothe prosodic patterns of the utterance. Some teachers may have realized theimportance of prosodic patterns, but what they mainly teach to students is how to usea falling tone for statement and a rising tone for questions, which hasn’t covered theprosodic patterns of sentences, neglecting to correct students’ mistake in prosodicmistakes in their daily utterance in English. Nowadays, many researchers analyze andpredict the prosodic issues of EFL learners, but few empirical studies of prosody havebeen conducted.
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1.2 Significance of the Study
SiAdvs, as the name suggestes, is placed on the initial position of sentences. An adverbial structure is one of the essential functional elements of a sentence.SiAdvSs can be used to express the time, manner, adjoin state or transition. They areparts of the most common constructions in English and they have been the topics forthe research of English discourse intonation by English native phoneticians andpractitioners since the last decades. Nevertheless, quite little has been achieved in theunderstanding of their prosodic patterns in Chinese and English.On the aspects of the theoretical and practical values of the study, the prosodicsimilarities and differences of prosodic patterns of SiAdvSs between English andChinese — as well as their prosodic realization help researchers achieve a betterunderstanding of both two target languages and, as a result, facilitate EFL (English asa foreign language) and CEL (Chinese as a foreign language) learners to recognize thedifferent patterns of each language and achieve an efficient acquisition of prosodicpatterns of SiAdvSs in English and Chinese.On the aspect of the methodology, this is an empirical study, based on acousticphonetic experiments and computer technologies, which ensures the validity andcreativity of the present study.
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Chapter Two LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Key Terms and Relevant Issues
The term prosody itself can be traced back to the Greeks, who want to refer tofeatures of speech which were not indicated in orthography, specifically to the tone ormelodic accent which characterized full words in ancient Greek. Recently, this termrefers to the principles of verification, covering such things as rhythmical patterns,rhyme schemes and meter structure.Crystal (1969) defined prosody as the variations in loudness, tempo pitch, andrhythm, which is used in supra-segmental phonetic and phonology. Sometimes it isused broad sense as a synonym for ‘supra-segmental’, but a narrow sense it onlyrefers to the above variables, the rest of supra-segmental features belongs toparalinguistics.Gimson (1970) claimed that prosody, a sound whose phonetic nature can be described and function in the language determined, and it has not only quality, butalso length, pitch, and a degree of stress. In addition, Gumperz (1982) mentioned thatprosody refers to variations in loudness, changes in vowel length, stress, intonationand overall shifts in speech register.Clark and Yallop (2000) took the term prosody to linguistic information of theking often described as rhythm and intonation. The primary acoustic parameters ofrelevance here are duration, fundamental frequency and intensity.In sum, prosody treats of all aspects of the sound system-above the level ofsegmental sounds, e.g. stress, intonation and rhythm.
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2.2 Relevant Theoretical Studies
This part aims to introduce some theoretical studies that are relevant to thepresent study. It is generally agreed that the earliest discussion of melody in spoken English isthat of John Hart in his Orthographie, and The opening of the unreasonable writing ofour Inglish toung. The former, published in 1569 has a long section on intonationwhich is essentially a discussion of rules for the use of punctuation marks, thequestion-mark and exclamation-mark in particular. In The opening of theunreasonable writing of our Inglish toung, there is an attempt to outline the nature ofstress in English, within the general perspective of spelling-reform, which Hartfavoured. After Hart, apart from incidental mention in treatises on English as whole, thereference to pitch made by the metrists, the isolated work of Butler, who provides thefirst connected discussion of the two main English tunes, linking rises and falls withpunctuation and grammatical contrasts, and Flint’s comparative study, which involvedreference to stress, there is no specific study until Steele and Walker. Punctuation wasdiscussed in terms of logical, semantic or grammatical relationship between parts ofan utterance, with an occasional mention of pause and pitch. Walker’s work was donewithin a markedly pedagogical orientation; he was anxious to give guidance to thosewho wanted to speak and read well. He paid a great deal of attention to theoreticalprinciples, and was fully aware of the systemic basis of tonel contrasts. He followsButler, and also Perry, in linking prosodic patterns with grammatical units, beginningwith the sentence. He outlines a system of three pauses and devises sixteen rules fortheir placement according to the syntax of the passage to be read. He also addedsymbols for falling-rising, rising-falling and level pitch, these, along with those forrising and falling, being closely linked to syntax.
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Chapter Three METHODOLOGY .....31
3.1 Research Questions.......31
3.2 Research Design......32
Chapter Four RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS .........39
4.1 Prosodic Patterns of SiAdvSs in English ....39
4.2 Prosodic Patterns of SiAdvSs in Chinese .........62
4.3 Similarities and Differences of Prosodic Patterns of SiAdv.......97
4.4 Acquisition of Prosodic Patterns of SiAdvSs by EFL Learners .....99
Chapter Five CONCLUSION......121
5.1 Major Findings......121
5.2 Implications.....125
5.3 Limitations and Suggestions .........126
Chapter Four RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
4.1 Prosodic Patterns of SiAdvSs in English
Tonality is the division of the utterance into chunks, and these chunks are calledthe intonation phrases (IPs). Here I will list the chunks of each sentence on the basisof the five types of SiAdvSs in English to show how RP speakers tend to divide theintonation phrases and then I will discuss the way the speakers used to realize theTonality.In the following tables, ‘SEN’ is short for ‘sentence’. The number ‘01-18’ is thesentence order of English sentences which contains the SiAdvSs. ‘//’ is used for boundaries between IPs. We can see from the table 4.1 that most RP speakers take SiAdvSs in thethree sentences (SEN01, SEN02, and SEN03) as one IPs, except that one RP speakerput the whole sentence (SEN02) as one IP instead of taking the SiAdvS as anindependent IP. It may because the SiAdvS and the whole sentence are both short, thespeakers can read the sentence easily and fluently and don’t need to read the sentencein two IPs to stress the main information of the sentence.
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CONCLUSION
In this chapter, I will concude what I have found and discussed in the above.Then the limitation of the present study will be presented, as well as the forwardsuggestions. In English, (i) RP speakers tend to read these SiAdvSs in one IPs. Pause andpitch reset are the main methods used by RP speakers to realize the Tonality of theSiAdvSs. And compared with pause, pitch reset is used more frequently by the RPspeakers. (ii) In this study, the lexical words of English, such as the nouns, verbs,adjectives and adverbs bear the nucleuses. And the percentage of adverbs as nucleusesis the highest. Verbs and Nouns are also likely to bear the nucleuses.（iii）For tonepattern, we can conclude:76.4% of the RP speakers adopt the high boundary tone at the end of thephrases and 22.2% of them adopt the level boundary tone at the end of the phrases. Ahigh boundary or level boundary tone indicates unfinished speech following, and thephrase is just the beginning part of a sentence, so after people say the phrase, theboundary tone must be a high or a level one, thus the following speech can becontinued.
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Reference (omitted)