An Acoustic Analysis Of The Impact Of Polarity And Pragmatic Functions On Intonation Of Canonical Tag Questions Read By Chinese EFL Learners

Intonation reflects sentence structures and helps speakers express their thoughts,feeling,mood,attitude and intention.Because of its vital role in communication,intonation has become a focal point of many linguistic studies.Previous researches focused on the literature review of theories of intonation,and theoretical or empirical studies on the intonation pattern of declarative statement,exclamatory sentence,yes-no question,and wh-question read by Chinese English learners have been conducted.However,acoustic studies on Canonical Tag Questions read by Chinese EFL learners are rare,especially those on the influence of polarities and pragmatic functions of tag questions.Based on Halliday's 3Ts System,the present study intends to explore intonation patterns of Chinese EFL learners in reading Canonical Tag Questions by answering the following three questions:(1)What are the intonation features(Tonality and Tone)of Chinese EFL learners when they read canonical tag questions with different polarities?(2)What are the intonation features(Tonality and Tone)of Chinese EFL learners when they read canonical tag questions with different functions?(3)What are the differences between the intonation(Tonality and Tone)of Chinese EFL learners and Native speakers when they read canonical tag questions?Subjects of the experiment are 30 non-English major students and 5 English native speakers from America.They were asked to read two sets of reading materials(contextual and non-contextual)and their reading was recorded.Praat was adopted to analyze the intonation patterns of Chinese EFL learners and native speakers.The results of this study showed that(1)When reading canonical tag questions with different polarity types,in terms of tonality,Chinese ELF learners usually divided the anchor and the tag into two intonation phrases.In terms of tone,in non-contextual tag questions,they used a rising tone.In contextual canonical tag questions,for some positive-negative canonical tag questions they used a falling tone but they adopted a rising tone in positive-positive and negative-positive tag questions.(2)When reading tag questions with different pragmatic functions,in terms of tonality,Chinese ELF learners usually divided the main clause and the tag into two intonation phrases regardless of the different pragmatic functions.In terms of tone,they tended to use rising tone in most questions,failing to adopt proper tones to realize the pragmatic functions.(3)Compared with Chinese EFL learners,when reading tag questions with different polarities,native speakers divided the clause and the tag into two intonation phrases in positive-negative and negative-positive tag questions and regard the clause and the tag as one intonation group when the polarity was positive-negative.As for the acoustic cues indicating the breaking of intonation phrases,Chinese EFL learners depend on using pauses while native speakers adopted pitch reset,anacrusis,lengthening as well as pauses;When reading canonical tag questions with different pragmatic functions,in informational canonical tag questions native speakers used a rising tone.In confirmatory canonical tag questions,most native speakers used falling tone although some of them chose rising tone.In peremptory canonical tag questions,all of the native speakers used a falling tone.This study can help investigate English intonation patterns of canonical tag questions read by Chinese EFL learners and native speakers and provide implications for the teaching and learning of intonation.