On The Prosodic Patterns Of Imperative Sentences In English And Chinese

Prosody is an essential part of languages. Prosodic features play an important role in both English and Chinese. Imperative sentences are the most commonly used syntactic constituents in both English and Chinese to convey orders, commands or a variety of moods in daily communications. Although there are some studies of such a pervasive and important structure from syntactic or semantic perspectives, there has been few studies concerned the prosodic features. What’s more, the prosody of target language, as part of suprasentmentals, is often regarded as difficult for EFL(English as a foreign language) learners or CFL(Chinese as a foreign language) learners to acquire correctly. Therefore, it is worth conducting research on the prosodic features of imperative sentences in both English and Chinese, by comparing the similarities and differences between them, and finding out the gap between Chinese EFL learners and RP(Received Pronunciation) speakers.This study attempts to use the Three Ts Theory(tonality, tonicity and tone)(Halliday, 1967; Wells, 2006) to analyze the prosodic patterns of imperative sentences produced by RP speakers, standard Chinese mandarin(MC) speakers, and Chinese EFL learners. Generally, it intends to address the research questions as follows:1)What are the prosodic features of imperative sentences in English?2)What are the prosodic features of imperative sentences in Chinese?3)What are the similarities and differences in the prosodic features of imperative sentences between Chinese and English?4) To what extent do the different prosodic features affect Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of imperative sentences prosodically?To find out answers to the research questions, acoustic experiments were designed and the stimuli were annotated. The stimuli for the present study consist of three kinds of English imperative sentences which were translated into Chinese with highly similar syntactic structure and sematic meaning.The subjects were four RP speakers, four standard MC speakers, and twelve Chinese EFL learners. All of them were required to read aloud the sixteen imperative sentences in English and fifteen imperative sentences in Chinese. The data were recorded via Cool Edit Pro V2.1 in the phonetics lab of JUST, and the recorded data were then annotated and analyzed by Praat software, and the figures were drawn from Praat picture. Finally, the statistic data generated from Praat scripts were analyzed in Excel.The major findings are:1. In English,(1) for tonality, RP speakers tend to make these short imperative sentences into one IP. If they have comma in these sentences, they will make a boundary between them.(2) For tonicity, RP speakers tend to put the nucleus on the last content word, and the realization of tonicity is through the three acoustic parameters, namely duration, intensity and pitch range.(3) For tone, they tend to use the nuclear tone of H*+L. In simple and complex imperative sentences, they show a grearess t tendency to use low(L%) or level(0%) boundary to end sentences,and in tag questions, they tend to use high boundary to end sentences.2. In Chinese,(1) for tonality, it is similar to imperative sentences in English. They tend to make these short imperative sentences into one IP. If they have comma in these sentences, they will make a boundary between them.(2) For tonicity, MC speakers tend to put the nucleus on the final prosodic word, and the realization of tonicity is through the three acoustic parameters, namely duration and pitch range(3) For tone, they show a great tendency to use the nuclear tone of H*+L. In simple and complex imperative sentences, they tend to use low(L%) or level(0%) boundary to end the sentences, and in tag questions, they tend to use high boundary to end sentences.3. Some similarities and differences were found in the prosodic features of imperative sentences between English and Chinese. The similarities are:(1) For tonality, these imperative sentences are treated as one IP. If they have comma in these sentences, they will make a boundary between them.(2) For tonicity, both RP speakers and MC speakers tend to put the nucleus on the final lexical word within one IP. And the realization of tonicity is through the three aspects: duration and pitch range.(3) For tone, they all show a great tendency to use the nuclear tone of H*+L in both English and Chinese. In simple and complex imperative sentences, they tend to use low(L %) or level(0%) boundary to end the sentences, and in tag questions, they tend to use high boundary to end sentences.The differences are:(1) For tonality, all RP speakers prefer to use a pitch reset to make boundaries between two successive IPs, while pause is mostly used by MC speakers to signal boundaries between two successive IPs.(2) For tonicity, it is protruded greatly by all three acoustic parameters in English, but in Chinese it is not protruded obviously via intensity.(3) For tone, the sentential tone of Chinese is influenced by the lexical tones in some extent, and the pitch contours change are more greatly than that of English sentence, and the pitch range is wider than that of English.4. As for the prosodic patterns of L2 English by Chinese EFL learners’. The findings are:(1) For tonality, All Chinese EFL learners divide the simple imperative sentences into one or two IPs which is consistent with RP speakers. In complex sentences, there is one sentence which is differ from RP speakers. In SEN15 of tag questions in imperative sentences, EFL learners did not understand the focus of the sentence, so the chunking is not consistent with RP speakers. Instead of using pitch reset to break the IPs, they tend to use pause to signal boundaries between the two IPs.(2) For tonicity, most of the Chinese EFL learners tend to locate the nucleus on the final content word which is similar to RP speakers.(3) For tone, the pitch movement produced by the EFL learners is not natural. And they often use H% to express L%, which is wrong. Chinese EFL learners tend to present big waves of pitch contours. They cannot use the fall and rise tone successfully.To some degree, the findings listed above provide a better understanding of the prosodic characteristics of imperative sentences in English and Chinese on the one hand, and shed light on English learning in China and Chinese learning all over the world on the other hand.