Contrastive Analysis Of English And Chinese Intonation System

Intonation is important in foreign language acquisition. More and more linguists have started to perceive its importance and directed their attention to its analysis. Competence in English intonation is helpful to Chinese students' listening comprehension and speaking ability. However, unawareness of prosodic difference between Chinese and English prosodic system leads Chinese learners to improper English intonation while communication. Therefore, comparison of English intonation with Chinese intonation may help us know the sentence structure and attitude well so as for a listener to get message well in communication. In this thesis, the author tries to explore the difference of forms and functions between Chinese and English intonation based on their prosodic differences.The thesis falls into five parts. Part one is a brief introduction to the purpose and organization of the thesis. In part two, the related literature is reviewed from two aspects, i.e. English intonation and Chinese intonation respectively. Part three is concerned with the prosodic basis of English and Chinese intonation from the theoretical perspective. In part four the author tries to demonstrate with examples functions intonation perform in English and Chinese, trying to find out the similarities and differences between them. The last part brings the whole thesis to conclusion by summarizing the major points covered in the preceding chapters.