The Boundary Of Natural Statements Prosodic Features Of Its Communicative Function

Based on 973 telephone corpus, we investigate prosodic features (PF) of sentence boundary (SB) in spontaneous speech from the point view of conversation analysis, and compare prosodic behaviors of SBs which have different communicative functions (CF). Grounded on these, three different CFs of PFs of SBs, which are determining sentence boundary, giving turn cues and implementing speech act, are studied.There are five steps in this study. Step 1 describes the three possibilities above of CFs of PFs of SBs from discourse analysis and introduces relevant prior researches in this field. Step 2 proves the three possibilities according to perception experiment. Step 3 investigates PFs of SBs in different CFs, and generalizes prosodic pattern of CFs according to prosodic analysis. Step 4 validates CFs of PFs of SBs according to statistical methods. Step 5 is a case study based on mood word 'A(å•Š)' , and investigates the relations between PFs and its CFs.The perception experiment argues that PFs in SBs have the three CFs such as determining sentence boundary, giving turn cues and implementing speech act. Phonetic feature analysis indicates the three CFs have relative steady prosodic patterns. The position and the type of the SB can be determined by PFs of the SB to some extent. This study indicates that PFs of SBs and its CFs correlate with each other closely. PF plays an important role in determining the position and the type of SB, but it' s not the only factor. Some other factors such as syntactic, semantic and contextual one must be put together.