Non-native Interlanguage Intonation System

"Intonation is the tune, the melody, the music of speech."(O'Connor, 1977: 37). In this statement, J. D. O'Connor set a high value on the intonation's status in speech. Meanwhile, J. R. Firth ever said that "without phonetics there can be no morphology of a spoken language, without intonation no syntax" (Lee, 1960: 5). Whenever we speak and whatever we say, regardless what language we use, we cannot avoid utilizing intonation. Intonation is inevitable in any language or dialect, which is omnipresent in human language. Meanwhile, intonation has much emotional and denotative meaning which is far beyond normal segments' abilities. To have a good command of the intonation of one language is the key issue to fulfill satisfactorily the task of speech communication. The same word, phrase, or sentence, (arranged in the same order) may mean different things by intoning them in different ways. It is really true that an error in the breadth of a single hair can lead you a thousand li astray. It should be pointed out that as for the non-natives' errors in speaking, natives are likely to give more patience and tolerance to imperfect pronunciation of single sounds, inappropriately-used words, and grammar errors, than to the wrongly-used intonation. That is because a mistaken intonation still means something (Tench, 1996:11).Intonation is so significant and inevitable and the mistaken intonation so unacceptable and misleading that it is very significant and absolutely necessary for non-native speakers (NNSs) to adjust to the target language (TL) intonation system in the actual speech communication. Mastering a foreign language intonation system, however, is no longer an easy thing. Like any other language, the intonation system of English is also very complicated and difficult for ESL learners to master. For the sake of solving the problems arisen in the process of intonation acquisition, the first and foremost is to provide an exhaustive description of NNSs' peculiar intonation system of target language (TL), called interlanguage (IL) intonation system in second language acquisition (SLA).However, interlanguage (IL) has not received enough investigation since Larry Selinker put it forward in 1972. The situation is much worse in China. Only from 1984 did Lu Jianji begin to introduce interlanguage into China (Lu, 1984). Although three decades have passed by, the interlanguage study is still in its infancy. Meanwhile, intonation as the core element of speech prosody has long been neglected in the teaching or learning English. "Learners of English usually concentrate on the segmental phonetics-the 'sounds' of the language (known technically as the segments)...Most learners also learn about word stress...But intonation (also known as prosody or suprasegmentals) is mostly neglected. The teacher fails to teach it, and the learner fails to learn it. Like other elements of language, some gifted learners will pick it up more or less unconsciously; but many will not."(Wells, 2006:1-2).As for the interface between interlanguage and intonation, there is also a marked lack of investigation. Till now only two books, Theoretical Issues in Contrastive Phonology edited by S. Eliasson (1984) and Interlanguage Phonology: The Acquisition of a Second Language System edited by G. Ioup and S. H. Weinberge (1987) are the comprehensive literature concerned with the interlanguage phonology. Even so, the two books only touched the interlanguage phonology in European countries, and paid little attention to other languages or dialects. The sole purpose of this thesis is to provide a comparatively exhaustive description of non-native speakers' interlanguage intonation system of English based on investigating non-English majors' (from Chongqing dialect area) English intonation patterns, rather than prescribe some rules on how the second language (SL) learners should obey in the learning and using TL intonation system. For this purpose, this study is carried out by comparing the NSs' intonation patterns (BBC announcers) with NNSs' intonation patterns (non-English majors of Chongqiong natives) on the same reading materials. In methodology, I follow one of Carl James' three research paradigms of interlanguage-- IL: TL comparisons, i.e. comparisons between NSs' intonation patterns and NNSs' IL intonation patterns (James, 2001: 3), to carry out my research. Unlike the existing literature on IL phonology which is largely based on the auditory analysis and has the impressionistic character, in this thesis in addition to the traditional auditory analysis, I will carry out the intonation analysis mainly grounded on the instrumental analysis, with the aid of the acoustic and phonetic research tool -Praat and the intonation transcription system of ToBI.The results of the study obviously show that the interlanguage intonation system of non-English majors of Chongqiong dialect speakers is quite distinctive from the intonation system of native speakers. The general conclusion of my present research is as follows:1) Tunes: NNSs' IL intonation patterns have fairly few types of tunes, which appear to be very mechanic with the simple alternative repetition of the two dominant tunes, i.e. fall tune (H*L-L%) and fall-rise tune (H* L-H%); the pre-nuclear pitch accents are very dull without apparent pitch movement in F0 contour, which is just like a level line.2) Prominence: NNSs' prominence patterns are mainly characterized by equal prominence being given to almost each accented word and non-accented word in the utterance. Meanwhile, NNSs incline to give frequent prominence to function words and the words with given information. However, these items are commonly deaccented by NSs. 3) Phrasing: NNSs incline to divide the utterance into smaller auditory chunks or intonation units than NSs. In addition, they tend to parse the utterance based upon not syntactic structure and information units like NSs, but the length of the word or the number of syllables.