Abstract
Drawing on the Auto-segmental Metrical theory in intonational phonology, this paper reveals the phonological structure of English interrogatives between Chinese EFL majors and native speakers from a syntactic pragmatic perspective, based on reading documents of eight English majors with Praat being its research tool. Findings show that the prosodic characteristics of interrogatives of English majors are obviously different from those of native speakers, which are mainly reflected in the segmentation of tone groups, boundary tone, intonation nucleus, and stress distribution. It purports to help English majors clarify the important pragmatic functions of intonation in information transmission and interpersonal communication, and foster strengths and circumvent weaknesses so as to better develop "Chinglish pronunciation" with Chinese characteristics; meanwhile, to bring enlightenment to English intonation teaching.
Highlights
Previous research has been conducted on three categories: one is the study on the intonation characteristics of single English interrogatives (Chen, 2006; Yuan, 2010); one is the contrastive study of interrogative intonation between English and Chinese (Lu, 2004; Guo & Shi, 2011) or interrogative intonation characteristics based on dialect (You, 2009; Erde & Wang, 2013); the other is the study of the function and meaning of English interrogative intonation (Yu, 2004; Hong, 2008; Chen, 2010)
This paper drawing on the Intonational phonology framework, uses the Praat acoustic software and combines syntactic and pragmatic functions of interrogatives to analyze prosodic features of English questions for college English majors, and reveal features and differences in phonological structure of English interrogatives between Chinese English majors and native speakers, so as to help English majors foster strengths and circumvent weaknesses in the aspect of intonation, which means carries forward "Chinese-English pronunciation" with Chinese characteristics and avoids some problems caused by weak intonation awareness
English majors mostly processed the main sentences and clauses into two or three tone groups, and only 37.5% of the students processed into one tone group
Summary
Intonation can convey syntactic, pragmatic, and emotional information. In order to better understand how intonation conveys information, it is not enough to focus only on the acoustic variables that represent this information, and necessary to combine the specific intonation variables (such as rising and falling boundary tones) reflected in the pitch curve diagram of intonation with the linguistic characteristics of utterance (such as syntactic characteristics; interrogative types) (Ladd, 2008:213). It can be seen that there are few empirical studies on the prosodic structure of English interrogatives of Chinese learners, and most of them only involve one sentence pattern of interrogative sentences, let alone comprehensive analysis from the perspectives of syntax, pragmatics, and intonation function. The typical intonation pattern of wh-questions H*L-L% (high fall) indicates that the speaker is trying to get more information or initiate a subtopic (Hedberg et al, 2009) For this special sentence form of interrogatives, it is very important to use appropriate phonological structure to convey information in speech expression; otherwise, misunderstanding or interruption of speech will occur. This study applies the theory of intonational phonology to analyze the prosodic features of English interrogatives of Chinese learners in combination with syntax. 2) What are the effects of these differences in prosodic features on pragmatic functions of discourse? 3) What implications does this study bring to intonation teaching for English majors?
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