A Comparative Study Of Sentence Tones Between English And Chinese Based On Tone Theory

Intonation is a variation of spoken pitch that is not used to distinguish words;instead it is used for a range of functions such as indicating the attitudes and emotions of the speaker,signaling the difference between statements and questions,and between different types of questions,focusing attention on important elements of the spoken message and helping to regulate conversational interaction.Generally speaking,English is an intonational language,whereas Chinese is a tonal language.Both the intonation and tone are closely related with pitch movement,and thus these two languages fall into different pitch systems.Influenced by Chinese tone,Chinese EFL learners find it difficult to grasp the complicated rules of English intonation,and are often confused by the different tone patterns of English utterances,thus making mistakes in communications with native English speakers.It is very important for the Chinese EFL learners to get rid of the influence of Chinese intonation and master the rules of English intonation.This study tries to find out the similarities as well as the differences of the tone between English and Chinese by analyzing and comparing the tone patterns between English and Chinese,and also to provide a theoretical guidance for Chinese EFL learners to have a better understanding of English sentence tones.The thesis is divided into five chapters.Chapter One serves as the introduction,including the background and significance of the study as well as the layout of the thesis.Chapter Two is a literature review of the previous intonation study of English and Chinese.Chapter Three provides the differences of sentence tones between English and Chinese,analyzes the relationship among tonality,tonicity and tone groups,compares the types and functions of tone used in the two languages,and emphasizes the importance of nucleus and boundary tone respectively.Chapter Four focuses on the relationship between sentence-types and tone types.Based on the markedness theory,the tone groups in English are divided into unmarked ones and marked ones.Chapter Five is the conclusion.It summarises the whole study,concludes the similarities and differences of tones between English and Chinese,and provides a theoretical guidance for Chinese EFL learners to master the rules of English sentence tones.This chapter also points out the limitations so as to help improve the future studies.