The Prosody Of Deferential Speech In Chengdu Dialect

Politeness serves as a critical component in cross-cultural communication,with prosody significantly influencing the judgment of politeness across all human languages.Therefore,the exploration of prosody in polite speech has garnered substantial interest.As a vital aspect of politeness,deference also holds significant communicative value.However,the prosodic features of deferential speech have been relatively under-researched compared to flat politeness.Chengdu dialect,a representative of Southwest Mandarin,boasts unique phonological characteristics.However,a paucity of research has probed into prosodic features of attitudinal speech in the Chengdu dialect.This research seeks to address this gap and explore the prosody of deferential speech in the Chengdu dialect.Taking the prosody of deferential speech in the Chengdu dialect as an example,a production experiment was conducted to explore the prosody of deferential speech in the Chengdu dialect.The study is guided by two research questions:1)What are the prosodic features of deferential speech in the Chengdu dialect?2)Are there any similarities between the prosodic features of the deferential speech in the Chengdu dialect and those in Standard Mandarin?In order to answer these questions,a production experiment was conducted involving 30 native Chengdu dialect speakers,comprising 15 males and 15 females.The experimental stimuli consisted of 10 distinct scenarios with a total of 20 sentences,spoken separately to a revered elderly professor and a close friend.Eight acoustic parameters were extracted for analysis,including mean pitch,pitch standard deviation,duration,mean intensity,local jitter,local shimmer,H1-H2,and Harmonics-to-Noise Ratio(HNR).Linear Mixed Models were utilized in R to analyze the prosodic differences between deferential and neutral attitudes.And a random forest model was executed to compare the contribution of prosodic features in expressing deferential speech in the Chengdu dialect.Finally,a comparison was made between the prosodic features of deferential speech patterns in the Chengdu dialect and those in Standard Mandarin,in order to investigate whether there are any similarities between them.The primary findings from this study are twofold: 1)In the Chengdu dialect,deferential speech exhibited lower mean pitch,intensity,pitch standard deviations,local shimmer,local jitter,and HNR,but longer duration,and higher H1-H2 compared to neutral speech.2)The Chengdu dialect was similar to Standard Mandarin in terms of mean pitch,mean intensity,duration,and voice quality,in the expression of deferential speech.This implies that despite differing phonological features,the Chengdu dialect and Standard Mandarin as two variables of the Chinese language utilize a similar prosodic encoding system for expressing deferential speech.The present findings hold notable significance.They complement the study of dialectal attitudinal prosody and fill a research gap in the study of attitudinal prosody in the Chengdu dialect.Additionally,the prosodic data quantified in the production experiments of deferential speech in the Chengdu dialect might have potential implications for speech engineering.It could aid in the synthesis or recognition of affective speech,thereby providing valuable support for this field.