A Study Of The Pitch Of Intonation On Interrogative Sentence In Chinese Spontaneous Speech

Intonation represents tones,emotions and attitudes in communication,which exists in every forms of language.The same sentences can be different through being endowed with various of tones.As for Chinese,the intonation is unique and complicated because of the superposition of the intonations and tones.Interrogative sentence is one of the most important expressions of dialogue with its vorious structures and modal particles at the end.The modal particles at the end of the interrogative sentences convey the different meanings and express particular functions.Interrogative sentence is closely related to syntax,semantics and pragmatics and researchers has deely studied on it.In this paper,interrogative intonation of chinese spontaneous speech is the study object and we will compare yes-no questions,wh-questions,positive-negative questions and alternative questions to review their interrogative tones.Meanwhile,we attempt to choose modal particles“?”“?”in yes-no questions and “?”“?”in wh-questions to observe their impact on the rise and fall of interrogative tones.After comparison we find out that the change of the interrogative tone in that four sentences is associated with functions and interrogative level,and different modal particles make the tones as a whole and at the end keep their own characteristics.