Research On Speech And Syntactic Interface Of Interrogative Pronoun Sentences

Wh-sentences are sentences with wh-words. Though wh-words are typical syntactic markers of wh-questions, they could serve as markers of statements in spoken Chinese, as is shown in “b?obao xi?ng chi?di?nr shénme?(What does the baby want to eat?)”and“b?obao xi?ng chi?di?nr shénme.(The baby wants to eat something.)” Without morphological transformation, wh-words in Chinese are not syntactically marked.Therefore, the complexity of Chinese wh-wordsmakes the recognition of two major functional moods, i.e. statement and interrogative, a big challenge in dialogue understanding and speech-to-speech translation.Based on the functional classification of Wh-words, we adopted the theory of Autosegmental-Metrical Phonology(AM) to analyze prosodic features of wh-sentences in spoken Chinese, in the hope of providing valid data for the construction of model to recognize functional moods of wh-sentences.This study consists of two parts. In the first part, we classified the functions of wh-sentences into two types, 8 subclasses in total, based on ?Xiandai Hanyu Babaici?(Eight-hundred Words of Contemporary Chinese)(Lv Shuxiang). The first type is the interrogative usage(Wh-), including Specific Reference(Wh-SR), Non-reference(Wh-NR) and Rhetorical Question(Wh-qh); the second type is the non-interrogative usage(Nwh-), including General Reference(Nwh-GR), Non-reference(Nwh-NR), Rhetorical Question(Nwh-qh), Wh-question(Nwh-qw) and List(Nwh-Lt). By investigating functional distributions of wh-sentences in different domains, we found that the functions of wh-sentences are related with the properties of different domains. We studied the syntactic characteristics of wh-sentences in each type, and summarized the syntactic features related to functional moods after the investigation of functional distributions in different domains. Wh-sentences without marked syntactic features were to be analyzed from the aspect of prosody.In the second part, the interface between phonetics and syntax which includes two aspects.Firstly, we analyzed the relationship between the sentence stress and wh-words(or other syntactic constituents). According to different functional intonations, the probability of interrogative pronouns getting the intonation stress varies correspondingly: the percentage of interrogative pronouns attracting stress in questions is 22.6%, while only 5.16% in declaratives. This conclusion proved that although interrogative pronoun is the default focus of the interrogative sentence, sentential stress may be placed on other constituents.Secondly, wh-sentences of the same syntax structure but with different functional moods were designed, based on the corpus of spoken dialogue. After investigating the prosodic characteristics of these wh-sentences, we proposed several useful prosodic features in recognizing the functional moods of wh-sentences, which are listed as follows:1. The global F0 contours of wh-words: The global F0 contours of wh-words in wh-questions are a little higher than those in wh-statements;2. The boundary tones: The boundary tones of interrogatives are featured by H%, while those of statements are featured by L% or H%. In wh-statements, the tonal shapes of boundary tones remain the same as lexical tones; encoded by the boundary feature H% of the interrogatives, however, the tonal shapes in wh-questions change a lot: the final part of T1 and T4 shows a rising pattern, and the slope of T2 and T3 are changed, which wasreferred to as “successive addition boundary tone” by Chao(1933).If the boundary syllables are disyllables, the tonal shapes of the penults remain the same as lexical tones in wh-statements, but those in wh-questions would show a downward trend in the effect of wh-words.3. Stress:Stress distribution of sentences with different functional moods were carefully investigated. In both wh-questions and wh-statements,stressmainly falls on the last syllable with canonical tone, with a few on the predicate verbs. Besides, stress in wh-questions might fall on the wh-word, but wh-word in wh-statements would never be stressed. Therefore, sentences with stressed wh-words must be interrogatives.Based on AM theory and results of acoustic analysis, phonetic features are divided into local and global ones. According to the discriminant analysis, the features that play an important role in discriminating the functional mood of wh-sentences are summarized as follows:1. local features1) the Harmonicity to Noise Ratio(HNR) of wh-words;2) the difference of HNR,F0 mean and intensity between wh-words and the boundary tones; 3) theF0 slope,duration and F0 mean of boundary tones; 4)the HNR of penults(if the boundary syllables are disyllables). 2. global features The linear regression and first order difference(FD) mean of the whole sentence.