A Comparative Study Of Mandarin And Uygur Declarative And Interrogative Intonations

Mandarin Chinese is a typical tone language, while Uygur is a non-tone language. The purpose of the present study was to investigate in detail how declarative and interrogative intonations are manifested in MC and Uygur, the common intonational features of them, and the specific differences in intonation systems between them.Production experiments upon Mandarin and Uygur declarative and interrogative intonations were carried out. Two groups of speakers with one group of 10 native speakers of MC and one group of 10 native speakers of Uygur (each with balanced gender distribution) participated in the experiments. Data collection in the experiments was conducted by using the speech signal processing package Praat (Version 4.6.09) and data analysis was performed by using the statistic program SPSS (Statistic Program for Social Sciences) (Version 11.5).The results showed that: (1) in both MC and Uygur, declarative intonation showed the falling pitch; (2) in both MC and Uygur, what differentiated between declarative and interrogative intonations didn't only rest on the end of the sentence, the contrast between them involved pitch differences over a larger temporal domain. Furthermore, comparisons among different types of interrogative sentences showed that in MC the four types of interrogative sentences (yes-no question with/without particle, wh-question, A-not-A question) can not be distinguished from each other in the initial and mid parts of the sentence, but when it came to the sentence-final part, these four types of questions fell into two categories, with yes-no question (without or with particle) having significantly higher F0 values than wh-question and A-not-A question. In Uygur, the four sentence types didn't have differences in the initial and mid parts either, while in the last part of the sentence, the four sentence types were discriminated, with yes-no question without particle having significantly higher F0 values than other types of interrogative sentences.The comparative study of Mandarin and Uygur declarative and interrogative intonations can help us understand their respective intonational features, which is helpful for L2 learners to learn the intonations of MC and Uygur. Moreover, the current study provides scientific evidence for cross-language comparison of intonation.