An OT Analysis Of Cantonese English Learners’ Acquisition Of English Declarative Sentence Intonation

Mandarin Chinese is a tone language. The intonation of Chinese is restricted by lexical tones. Whenever a tone changes, lexical meaning changes co-occur. Such difference results in many difficulties for Chinese learners of English(CLEs) when they are learning English. Cantonese is one of Chinese dialects, so it is tone language and has the same features as Mandarin Chinese. Therefore, problems existing in acquisition of English intonation by Cantonese learners of English have gained greater attention, which do attract many linguists to try to do some research on the acquisition of English intonation learning. However, most of the researches are descriptive and the researchers attempt to point out different features of English intonation by Cantonese learners of English. Few have applied Optimality Theory to explain such problems coming up in the process of learning English intonation. OT has been employed to explain many main phonological phenomena. It is mainly concerned about constraints and constraints ranking. Constraints are universal, so OT has universality. OT restricts constraint ranking that can establish the evaluator system to justify the optimal candidate. The present research tries to find the constraints of the English declarative intonation by Cantonese learners of English and look for how many constraints the outputs of Cantonese learners of English have violated.There are six chapters in total in this research. The first chapter serves as an introduction of the whole study, including the motivation of this study and its significance, research questions, research methodology, data collection and the outline of the thesis. The second chapter two reviews three main approaches to intonation,studies on intonation in OT, theoretical and empirical studies on acquisition of English intonation by CLEs. The third chapter presents the theoretical framework of this thesis, Optimality Theory. The Architecture of OT Grammar, working constraints of this study will be presented in this section. The fourth chapter is research design that consists of the reading materials in this research and subjects the researcher has chosen. The fourth chapter also includes the instruments that are used in theexperiment, Research procedures and data collection. The fifth chapter is data analysis and discussions that is about the OT analysis of the English statement intonation by Cantonese learners of English and the comparison between the English statement by Cantonese learners of English and that of native speakers. In this chapter, the researcher mainly discusses the constraints that the output of English statement intonation by Cantonese learners of English violates. The last chapter concludes the major findings of this research, presents the theoretical, empirical implications of this research and the limitations of this research.Based on the analysis, the tentative findings of this study can be summarized as follows:(1) The intonation of English statements read by Cantonese learners of English violates constraint IDENTIN-IO. The features of statement intonation are all different from those of native English speaker.(2) Constraint ALIGN-FOC is the second most constraint that is violated by the intonation of English statement spoken by Cantonese learners of English.Cantonese learners of English are confused about which word in a statement is the focus.(3) The intonation of adverbial statement, enumerating statement and subordinate statement spoken by Cantonese learners of English violates constraints ALIGN-XP, WRAP-XP and BIN-MAP much. Cantonese learners of English have more difficulty in learning the intonation of adverbial statement, enumerating statement and subordinate statement and they do not know how to pause a longer sentence when they read it.(4) The intonation of simple statement read by Cantonese learners of English violates constraints less. Simple statement has a simple sentence structure and it is easy to be understood. Therefore, Cantonese learners of English have less difficulty in learning the intonation of simple English statement.