Abstract
Intonation plays an essential role in verbal communication. Besides, intonation patterns that influence information transmission in speeches have always been a significant research focus in current years. Based on Halliday's intonation systems, this study investigated the intonation features, including tonality, tonicity and tone shown in speeches of Chinese EFL learners and English native speakers. In the study, the acoustic tool Praat and Excel were employed to label the data and analyze the obtained statistics. Results indicated that Chinese students were able to use tone groups and marked tonicity to emphasize the focus of information units. However, there existed some improper and excessive use of tonality segmentation and marked tonicity. Moreover, Chinese students showed more changeable tones when delivering speeches, which might create an understanding barrier of listeners. In order to improve Chinese EFL learners' use of intonation, a more thorough comprehension of the information units, key focus and meaning of each tone is required.
Highlights
Intonation is the change of pitch of the whole utterance and is the pattern of pitch movement
As one of the important means to carry information in oral English communication, mastering and using intonation properly and correctly should be regarded as a significant and necessary goal (Yang, 2020). Those intonational studies about expression and communication mainly focused on intonational studying and education (Zou, 2020; Yang, 2020); intonational perception and therapy (Han, Zhang & Xiao, 2020; He, Yang et al, 2020; Steffman, 2019); or the epistemic meanings realized by intonation (Honnet, Grazov et al, 2018; O’Grady, 2020)
Graduation speeches that five famous people delivered in the United States and the speeches presented by 17 Chinese students at 21st Century Coca-Cola Cup National English Contest were used as the corpus
Summary
Intonation is the change of pitch of the whole utterance and is the pattern of pitch movement. Under the framework of Halliday’s intonation systems (1967), the tonality segmentation, the use of marked tonicity and distinctive tones that speakers used in speeches were investigated. The intonation system encompassed three different systems, including the tonality, the tonicity and the tone (Halliday, 1967). When the speaker needed to emphasize some specific information, the information focus might be put on the items other than the last lexical item within one tone unit At this time, this kind of tonicity was regarded as the marked tonicity. When there was no special purpose of expression or explanation, using the unmarked tonicity was the relatively best choice (Halliday & Greaves, 2008) Another part of the intonation system was the tone, which could be described as the pitch trajectory on the tonicity. As stated by Halliday (2008), five distinctive tones (Tone 1, Tone 2, Tone 3, Tone 4 and Tone 5) composed of the primary tone system and two further kinds of intonation contour (Tone 13 and Tone 53)
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