Comparative Analysis Of Volume Ratio With Duration Ratio And Pitch Fluctuation Scale In Sereval Kinds Of Chinese Declarative Sentence And Interrogative Sentence

The process of interpersonal communication is also the process of transmitting information.The theory of information structure provides motivation for the prosodic encoding of sentences in speech.The prosodic features of sentence are composed of intonation,rhythm and stress,which based on three acoustic elements,pitch,duration,and intensity.This paper reviews the main ideas of Halliday’s and Lambrecht’s study on information structure and sentence form,and then summarizes many Chinese scholars’ significant conclusions of experimental phonetics research on prosodic features.The functional intonation is the tone of sentence in speech to show speaker’s epistemic logic and affection.In speech the stress highlight the important information as wide focus or narrow focus.The levels of boundary tone are the key to analyze the rhythmic structure of sentence,and levels of stress are able to mark the quality of information.Pitch fluctuation scale,duration ratio and volume ratio are three important quantified indicators to survey the pitch,duration,and intensity of each character in a Chinese sentence.This experimental research studied the prosodic match pattern of Chinese declarative sentence and interrogative sentence with the natural focus,Chinese interrogative sentence with modal particle “ma” or “ba”,and also studied two type of topic-comment sentence.One is time word as the topic,the other is to move the object to become a topic.Through comparison and analysis of the data of pitch fluctuation scale,pause extension ratio and volume ratio of the preposing sentence with reference to the typical subject-predicate sentence,this study found that the time-topic sentence has the broad focus,but the object-topic seems to raise the entire tone range of initial prosodic word and lower the tone range of the subsequent word,especially lower the top line of tone range,so as to mark the contrastive focus.At the end of sentence,the verb complement becomes the natural focus.