A study on the intonation of Japanese modal particles “ne” and “yo”

Abstract

The Japanese sentence-final particles “ne” and “yo” represent modality. These particles are assumed to have several meanings, but the definition of the meanings of them has been an open question. In particular, the relationship between the meaning of these particles and their intonation contours remains unresolved. Therefore, to clarify this, we investigated the meaning of the particles “ne” and “yo” in actual utterances using a questionnaire and analyzed the pitch contours of the utterances acoustically. A Standard Japanese speaker was asked to produce 36 utterances with “ne” or “yo” particles controlling three types of pitch contours, falling, rising and flat. First, we asked 44 Japanese university students (aged 18-24) to judge the “naturalness” of the obtained utterances and to describe their meaning. The results revealed that the particle “ne” tended to have a negative connotation in the case of the falling intonation. Second, the pitch contours of final two syllables of the utterances were analyzed acoustically. The results indicated that the intonation contours differed between the two particles; the rising range was wider in “ne” than “yo”. This was assumed to reflect the different meaning between the two particles. Speech corpus data will be examined to verify above results.