A Study On The Intonation Features Of English Interrogative Questions Produced By Korean Minority College Students Of China

Intonation is one of the most important factors in the linguistic communication. It can convey information, eliminate grammatical ambiguity and express a speaker’s mood and attitude. In the interrogative questions, it may show different intonation features according to their types. This paper mainly investigates two problems based on the Auto-segmental metrical theory with the ToBI labeling system and the K-ToBI labeling system. The first one is the comparison of the intonation between English and Korean interrogative questions, and the second one is the analysis of the intonation features of English interrogative questions produced by Korean minority college students.Through the comparative analysis of the intonation between four types of English and Korean interrogative question sentences, this paper found out that there are many similarities and differences in the intonation of interrogative questions between English and Korean. The boundary tones of yes-no question, wh-question and selective question of English and Korean are all respectively realized by rising tone, falling tone and falling tone, while the range of rising or falling in Korean is much smaller than that of English. The types of boundary tones of English tag question are determined by its semantic meaning, while in Korean, it is determined by the final endings. From the perspective of the pitch accent, the most frequently used in the English yes-no question is L*. In the condition of natural focus, pitch accents of the English wh-quetion can be realized in the beginning, middle and ending of the sentence. When there are two options in the English selective question, the pitch accents of them are L*and H*and when there are three, they are L*,L*and H*. When the English tag question expresses the information of confirmation or asking, their pitch accents are respectively H*or L*. Korean is different from English in the perspective of language type, and the individual tones in the syllables make up the Accentual Phrase (AP).Through the analysis of the intonation features of English interrogative questions produced by8Korean minority college students in Yanbian area, taking4native English speakers’intonation model of record reading materials as the reference standard, we get the following results. Firstly, the pitch ranges of four types of English interrogative questions produced by Korean minority college students are all smaller than those of English native speaker, and the degree of rising or falling of the intonation of Korean minority college students is not as large as English native speaker. Secondly, except for using well L-L%boundary tone in the wh-question, Korean minority college students show many mistakes in the realization of the boundary tones in the other types of interrogative questions, such as the undershoot of the rising or falling of the boundary tone and the disagreement between the mood that the context requested and the boundary tone they actually used. Thirdly, in the perspective of the pitch accent, Korean minority college students show nonproficiency in the realization of the stresses of the multi-syllable words. The prominence of the syllable is not closely linked with the context, and prominent multi-pitch accents phenomenon is appeared. Fourthly, in the phrasing of the intonation, Korean minority college students are apt to use the count of syllables in a word to phrase and result in several features that the frequency of pause is larger, the place of pause is incorrect and the time of pause is longer than native speakers.