Production And Perception Of Genuine And Mock (Im)polite Mandarin Speech By Native And Non-Native Speakers

(Im)politeness is an important topic in pragmatics study.Most research to date,however,has focused on genuine politeness and impoliteness,yet many issues related to(im)politeness do not straightforwardly fit these two opposing extremes,such as mock(im)politeness.As specialized social affective functions in speech communication,mock politeness and mock impoliteness are usually characterized by unique prosodic patterns that conflict with the literal meaning of the utterance.This makes significant the present study,an empirical research on the production and perception of the Mandarin speech conveying the genuine and mock(im)polite attitudes.The present research focuses on production and perception of(im)polite Mandarin utterances in two sentence modes,i.e.,interrogative and imperative.There are three research questions:(1)What are the differences in acoustic parameters of Mandarin(im)polite(genuine politeness vs.mock politeness and genuine impoliteness vs.mock impoliteness)requests and criticisms expressed by Chinese native speakers?(2)What are the acoustic differences in(im)politeness expressed by Korean learners of Mandarin? What are the similarities or differences compared with the native speakers?(3)How are(im)polite requests and criticisms in two modes(imperative and imperative)perceived in accuracy test and politeness rating test?For answering the first two questions,we conducted the production experiment.Two groups of speakers,i.e.,native speakers of Mandarin and Korean learners of Mandarin were recruited,and each group consisted of 24 speakers(12 male and 12 female).16 related acoustic parameters were extracted,like fundamental frequency,duration,intensity,voice quality.Linear Mixed Models were used to examine the acoustic differences between polite vs.mock polite and impolite vs.mock impolite attitudes.The major findings are summarized as follows:In both the Chinese and Korean groups,mock polite speech showed higher mean fundamental frequency(F0)and intensity,higher standard deviations in F0 and intensity,and lower HNR than genuine polite speech.In the Chinese group,genuine impolite speech showed higher mean F0 and intensity,higher standard deviations in F0 and intensity,faster speaking rate,higher jitter,higher shimmer,higher H1-H2,and lower HNR than mock impolite speech,suggesting that genuine impolite speech had reduced voice stability and increased breathy quality.In the Korean group,genuine impolite speech only showed higher mean intensity,lower standard deviation in intensity,and lower HNR than mock impolite speech.The third question was answered through perceptual experiments.24 native speakers of Mandarin participated in the accuracy test and 67 Chinese listeners participated in the politeness rating test.The main results are as followed:The perceptual accuracy in identification of the four attitudes,was in the order of genuine politeness > genuine impoliteness > mock politeness > mock impoliteness.The perceptual rating of politeness,in descending order,was genuine politeness > mock politeness > mock impoliteness > genuine impoliteness.Female listeners were more sensitive to(im)politeness and showed higher rate of accuracy in attitude identification than males.In genuine polite speech,interrogative utterances were perceived to be more polite than imperative utterances.In mock polite,genuine impolite and mock impolite speeches,imperative utterances were perceived to be more polite than interrogative utterances.Last but not least,(im)politeness was highly characterized by those prosodic parameters,but lexical cues could play roles as well.In light of the above findings,it is suggested that to cultivate second language learners of Chinese to be inter-culturally competent,it is pedagogically relevant to acquaint learners with the knowledge of attitudinal speeches and their different expressions.