A Contrastive Study Of The Prosodic Features Of English Imperatives Produced By The EFL Learners In Northeast China And The Americans

Prosody is the indispensable part of language,including intonation,stress and rhythm.Prosody plays an essential role in spoken English,yet it has long been neglected by Chinese EFL learners and English teachers.Imperatives act as one of the four English sentence type thus certainly occupy a significant position in English expression and daily communication.The thesis investigates the similarities and differences of the prosodic features of English imperatives produced by the EFL learners in Northeast China and the Americans in an experimental way and discusses the possible reasons for the differences.The thesis employs the “Three Ts” theory(tonality,tonicity and tone)and AM Theory(Autosegmental-Metrical Theory)to analyze the prosodic features of imperatives produced by the Northeast Chinese EFL learners and the Americans,and makes use of the software “Praat” following the combining annotation systems of ToBI and IViE to annotate the reading materials.The annotation results are extracted into Excel,further dealt with a formula and finally shown through tables and figures.The experimental materials are 16 imperatives from AESOP-CASS(Asian English Speech Corpus Project-Chinese Academy of Social Sciences),which are classified into three categories.The experimental subjects are 16 students from four cities of Northeast China(four from Harbin,Changchun,Shenyang and Dalian respectively),and six native Americans,both half male and half female.The thesis attempts to answer three questions listed as follows.1)What are the prosodic features of imperative sentences produced by the EFL learners in Northeast China and the Americans?2)What are the similarities and differences between the EFL learners in Northeast China and the Americans in terms of the prosodic features of imperative sentences?3)What are the possible reasons for the differences?The major findings are 1)For tonality,Northeast China EFL learners overwhelmingly take the imperatives as two or more than two intonational phrases,no matter they are simple imperatives or compound imperatives.For tonicity,almost allthe words in these imperatives are accented by the Northeast Chinese students.For tone,the Northeast Chinese students employ more than one tone type for each imperative.For tonality,the Americans tend to divide the simple sentences into one or two intonational phrases and tag questions into two intonational phrases.For toncity,the Americans generally locate the nuclei on the syllables of content words.For tone,the Americans exhibit a variety of tone types for compound imperatives.2)Speaking of the similarities,for tonality,all subjects of the two groups are able to consider the tag questioning parts in tag questions as one intonational phrase.They both display a characteristic of variety for segmenting the compound imperatives.For tonicity,they both lay nucleus on the last word in tag questions.For tone,they generally employ the same boundary tones of %H L% for declarative imperatives and %L H% for tag questions.For the tag questions,most of the two adopt a rising tone of “L*H” for the tag questions with no exception.When it comes to the differences,for tonality,the Americans are less variable on segmenting intermediate phrases or intonational phrases,and the number of intonational phrases or intermediate phrases is less than that of the Northeast Chinese students.There are more and longer pauses in the imperatives produced by the Northeast Chinese students than the Americans.For tonicity,there are a considerable number of Northeast Chinese students who put nucleus on prepositions,definite articles or conjunctions while the Americans barely do.The number of nuclei of the 16 sentences has been much reduced by the Americans.For tone,the biggest difference between them lies in tone types.There are fewer tone types for the imperatives produced by the Americans than the Northeast Chinese EFL learners among the 16 imperatives.In addition,the pitch change by the Northeast Chinese students is more than that of the Americans.3)The possible reasons for the differences are concluded as the syllabic differences,the negative transfer,and the neglect of prosody teaching and learning from the teachers and students.It is expected that the thesis could be of some help to the study of prosodic features and give some implication to English teaching in China.