Abstract
Besides segmental cues, suprasegmental features are used by speakers to affect listeners’ understanding of speech meanings. The emotional intonation of Chinese is quite attractive to us. As a tonal language, the intonation in Chinese is an autosegmental element independent of the lexical tone element, although these two elements are expressed by the same F curve. However, the F curve conveys both the linguistic and paralinguistic functions. Therefore, to understand the encoding mechanism of expressive speech in communication, we shall examine the interplay between tone and intonation in Chinese emotional speech. In this chapter we analyze the F patterns of seven Chinese emotional intonations, focusing on two issues: (1) the general and fine structure of acoustic cues of Chinese intonation, especially, how tone and intonation are co-encoded in boundary tones to convey expressive information and (2) the relationship between the acoustic form and the function of emotional intonation related to boundary tones.
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- 1.
In Standard Chinese, four tones is represented into tonal target H or L, specifically, it is HH for T1, LH for T2, LL(H) for T3 and HL for T4.
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Li, A. (2015). Emotional Intonation and Its Boundary Tones in Chinese. In: Encoding and Decoding of Emotional Speech. Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47691-8_5
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