A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Intonation

This thesis attempts to make a contrastive study of English and Chinese intonation. On adumbrating the overall makeup of Chinese prosody, a new approach is adopted. Chinese prosody is divided into three hierarchies: tone, tone- pattern and intonation instead of the present binary division— tone and intonation.In Part two, this new approach is introduced, and the different prosodic basis of English and Chinese is illustrated as well on the theories of authoritative works. Since English is an intonation language, the pitch movement of an English utterance is mainly the result of its intonation. However, in Chinese, a tone language, the pitch movement of an utterance is a combination of tone-pattern and intonation. Tone-pattern is formed by the tonal interplays when tones are uttered successively and it is to perform the function of distinguishing lexical meanings. Then, English and Chinese reflect their particular prosodic basis.On this background, the author lists and explicates some new findings in the comparison of English and Chinese intonation.In Part three, the forms of English and Chinese intonation are compared. Different prosodic basis determines the forms of their intonation to be distinct. English intonation is realized by pitch rising or falling, and the pitch shape of every syllable in the utterance is changed considerably for the intonation purpose. However, Chinese intonation is realized by raising or lowering the pitch height or by lengthening the duration, and the shape of tone-pattern basically retains in its interaction with intonation. And also because of the different prosodic basis, the size of English and Chinese intonation unit is different too.In Part four, the functions of English and Chinese intonation are compared. They share similar functions, such as attitudinal, grammatical and discourse function. But these functions are of different importance in the two languages, e.g.