An Analysis Of Commanding Sentence Intonation In Mandarin Chinese

This paper investigates the intonation of commanding sentence in Mandarin Chinese from phonological perspective. It adopts phonetic method to describe and analysis the fundamental frequency values and the prosodic structure of commanding sentence. As conclusion, the paper summarizes the intonation model of commanding sentence in Mandarin Chinese.The thesis begins with a brief introduction to western phonological theories on intonation study and the recent researches on Chinese intonation in Chapter I . Chapter II defines the range of commanding sentence in this research .Since there actually have been many different definitions and classifications on imperative sentence, only one of the classifications is followed to set the range of this research. Chapter III provides the phonetic experiment part, in which detailed and classified commanding intonation study is made including phonological analyses and necessary phonetic explanation. As a result, characteristics of commanding intonation are found. Chapter IV is the contrastive study on declarative intonation and commanding intonation. Chapter V comes the final conclusion of the whole thesis.The main conclusions of this research are as follows:1. It is feasible to study Chinese commanding intonation based on AM theory, and some general rules are found.2. In Chinese commanding sentences, there are pitch events that are similar to those in English. The difference is that there is no such pitch accent as L* within the scope of this study, since the prosodic units in the bottom part of pitch peaks are all unstressed and the prosodic units in the pointed part of pitch peaks are all stressed. Stress plays an important role in commanding intonation, each pitch peak in the manifestation of commanding sentence corresponds to one stress. Among the pitch peaks in commanding sentence, the most prominent one is the absolute prominence, and the rest is the relative prominence.3. In the pitch manifestations of common commanding sentence, each syllable does not necessarily correspond to each pitch prominence. The syllables that form one...