Comparison Between Intonation Of Enlish And Korean Declarative Sentence

English and Korean belong to different types of language and show different rhythmic feature. The thesis is a comparative study between the intonation of English and Korean declarative sentence. The study is carried out from the two aspects:the scale of undulation and phonetic realization of focus. The study of the scale of undulation is based on the theory of intonation pattern and fundamental frequency is as an unique acoustic parameters investigating the undulation of the whole sentence, then takes the English and Korean declarative sentences with different speeds as experimental sentences, investigating the the relationship between pitch range, scale of undulation and speed. The study of the phonetic realization of focus takes the fundamental frequency and duration as two acoustic parameters and through the phonetic realization of focus in English and Korean sentences, the study further makes comparison of the intonation of English and Korean declarative sentences.The conclusion of the thesis is:First, The pitch range of the whole sentence of English is larger than that of the sentence of Korean, and the uppermost line of pitch range of the former is higher than that of the latter.Second, in the aspect of scale of undulation, English and Korean declarative sentences both show declination in pitch, English and Korean declarative sentences both show the declination of pitch and the former undulates more than the lattee one. And English and Korean declarative sentences show consistency in the aspect of the relation between the pitch range of sentence-initial, sentence-middle and sentence-end, that is, the pitch range of sentence-end is the largest, next is sentence-initial, then the sentence-middle; the upper and lower line of pitch show declines from the sentence-initial to the end of sentence. Third, Under the slow speed, each pitch range in the sentence becomes wider; Under the fast speed, the pitch range of sentence initial and middle becomes narrower and the sentence undulates more; Under different speeds, the English declarative sentence undulates more than Korean declarative sentence.Fourth, the phonetic realization of focus modulates the FO contours of the sentence. English and Korean declarative sentences both realize the focus by lengthening the duration and heightening the pitch of the focus part. However, the differences are that English lengthens syllable duration of the focus part longer than Korean. In addition, in English, the focus realization is made by lengthening and heightening the duration and pitch of the syllable bearing stress of the focus part; In Korean, the focus realization is made by lengthening and heightening the duration and pitch of the all of mostsyllables of the focus part. In addition, the syllables of focus part in English declarative sentence are lengthened longer than that of Korean declarative sentence.Through the investigation of the scale of undulation and phonetic realization of focus, the study comes to the conclusion that English declarative sentence undulates more than Korean sentence. It is because that the intonation of English is controlled by the stress, when there is a focus part in a sentence, the FO contour of stressed syllables of focus part show a more prominent rising followed by a falling movement of unstressed syllables, thus the whole sentence shows an obvious undulation of intonation. In comparison, Korean as a syllable-timed language, each syllable tends towards equal in duration and pitch. When there is a focus part, the duration and FO contours of each syllable or most syllables of focus part are all lengthened and rised, therefore whole intonation of Korean sentence shows a slight undulation.