A Study Of Chinese EFL Learners’ Intonation Pattern Of Alternative Questions

Intonation can express people’s mood and attitude, reflect thoughts, feelings and intentions of communicators, mirror the semantic and grammatical structures thus can disambiguate different types of sentences. Intonation plays a vital role in daily communication, which makes it a focal point in language research. Previous studies have explored the intonation patterns of several sentence types as declarative statement, yes-no question, wh-question, tag question and exclamatory sentence etc. However, empirical studies concerning intonation patterns of alternative questions are rare.The objective of this study is to investigate Chinese EFL learners’ intonation pattern of alternative questions through comparison with that of native speakers to answer the following three research questions:1) What is the intonation pattern of alternative questions read by English native speakers? In particular, what are the nucleus placement and tone choices made by native speakers? Can this provide empirical evidence for Pruitt’s (2007,2008a,2008b,2011,2013) view of "final fall (required) & focus (optional)" for the interpretation of an alternative question? 2) What is the specific intonation pattern of Chinese EFL Learners regarding alternative questions compared with native speakers? In particular, what are the nucleus placement and tone choices made by Chinese EFL learners? 3) Can Chinese EFL Learners distinguish alternative questions and identically-worded disjunctive yes-no questions according to the context? With eight native speakers and 40 Chinese EFL learners as the subjects, the present study adopts Halliday’s 3T system to analyze the speech data through both auditory and acoustic methods.The findings of this study reveal that 1) native speakers show agreement in choosing the nucleus accent and tend to assign the focus to one disjunct of the two offered choices; regarding the tone choices, native speakers would use rising tone on the initial constituent to signify incompleteness, and falling tone on the final disjunct to indicate closure of choices.2) Chinese EFL learners often accent multiple words in one intonation unit, locate the focus in given information rather than the new information, and in the selection of tones, no statistically significant difference is found between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers. Chinese EFL learners have no trouble in using the falling tone on the final disjunct.3) The findings also show that only ten percent of the subjects can select appropriate tone to distinguish alternative question from identically-worded yes-no question based on context, while the other 90 percent have no idea whether there exist differences between the two question types.