A preliminary research on rhetorical structural and prosodic features in Chinese reading texts

Abstract

This paper investigates the interface of rhetorical and rhythmic aspects of several Chinese reading discourses within the RST framework. Distributions of rhetorical relations, stress degree and nuclearity in pre-pausal and post-pausal positions are examined in this current research. The RSTTool is used in diagramming the rhetorical structures of three reading texts, Narrative, Expositive and Descriptive respectively. The recordings, extracted from the Annotated Speech Corpus of Chinese Discourse (ASCCD), are further analyzed acoustically and statistically by applying Praat and R. The statistical analysis results show unbalanced distributions of rhetorical relations in different contexts, stress combinations and hierarchies. The examination of nuclearity shows nucleus-satellite combination, compared with satellite-nucleus combination, is inclined to extend the pause duration significantly. Based on the results, the study further proposes that distribution of relations, hierarchies, stress degrees and nuclearity are significantly related to pause duration and the intra-distribution of one and another.