A Phonological Analysis Of Cantonese Intonation

Intonation is an indispensable constituting element in spoken languages. It is usually perceivedas a stream of voices with specific meanings, thus described as a sequence of consecutivelyvarying pitch movements. But acoustically intonation can be represented as a continuum offundamental frequency (F0) in sounds, and gradually the pitch events in local positions areconsidered linguistically as important phenomena in intonation research. In tone languages, theF0movements of tones in lexical words have great impact on the formation of the overall curveof intonation in utterances. Cantonese, as a typical tone language, academically is admitted tohave six tonal distinctions and nine tonal pronunciations–a more sophisticated tone system thanthat of Chinese Mandarin. There have been a few findings in the review reporting on thephonological analysis of Cantonese intonation, or the relationships between Cantonese tones andintonation. However they had just discussed Cantonese intonation in the traditionally perceptualways, or only focused on the function of intonation of discriminating sentence types. Few ofthem have attempted to provide a phonological analysis of Cantonese intonation under thephonetic investigation. And a critical tendency in the past studies of Cantonese intonation lies inthe inclination of taking Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong as a canonical variety of this dialect,whereas it is Guangzhou (Canton in its old name) which is reckoned as the origin of Cantoneseand should be the focus on in the research of Cantonese.The present thesis observes the acoustic features of Cantonese intonation in two phoneticexperiments on native speakers in Guangzhou city, in order to analyze the phonological issues ofintonation in Cantonese. The experiments involve the reading and recording of natural speechproduced by the native Cantonese speakers in Guangzhou. The first experiment deals with theutterances of different lengths and various types for the purpose of phonological discussion ofintonation features. The second experiment is organized to record the lexical tones with the samesyllable but different tones. The result of the latter experiment helps to explore the phoneticperformance of lexical tones when they are put in utterances.Within the framework of the autosegmental-metrical (AM) theory, the intonation structure ofCantonese and the relevant intonation issues have been discussed in this thesis, such as theprosodic structure, intermediate phrase and declination. The phonological analysis indicates that there is distinct prominence in Cantonese utterance which is highlighted by the lengthenedduration or the obvious high pitch, and the intonational structures can be distinguished asconspicuously hierarchical. According to the phonetic result and the phonological analysis, thisthesis has also tried to present a phonological description for Cantonese intonation in terms ofthree levels. With comparison of F0contours of lexical tones in individual words and F0variation in the utterances, a level of M (mid) is adopted in the transcription, apart from the twolevels of H (high) and L (low), which are widely used in the description of European intonation.