An Analysis Of The Prosodic Features Of Mandarin Speech Attitude In Cantonese

Three kinds of attitudes were chosen as research objects in our daily life, which are accepted by most of us, namely Serious vs. Joking, Polite vs. Rude and Praising vs. Blaming. By investigating attitude speech difference in varying language context, this research attempted to inspect the impact of culture on the understanding and expressing of attitudes, specifically, their rules so as to provide some hints and clues for Cantonese in producing authentic Putonghua (Mandarin Chinese).General research methods are as follows:Firstly, attitude types were selected and tape scripts designed; then, voice materials were collected, Praat and relevant procedures were used to annotate the corpus and extract acoustic data, including Fo and duration.The speculative innovations introduced in this paper are:1. In this research, the definition and type of attitudes were revised. We add three types of attitude speech which were expressed by Cantonese. The attitude corpus is extended.2. We use experimental phonetics methods to analyze the Mandarin attitudes speech which uttered by two different native language speakers:Mandarin and Cantonese. From their cross linguistic contrastive analysis, we try to find the metrical errors of Cantonese.The main research results of present research are:1. In the aspect of neutral reading voice, comparing with Mandarin, the rate of Cantonese is slower, the Fo is lower, and the range of Fo is narrower. The tonal pattern is not very well; especially the falling-rising tone is not obvious. The Fo curve trend is similar to attitude voice.2. Serious vs. Joking:The difference between serious and joking both expressed by Cantonese is small, and the same to neutral reading. The characteristics are lower Fo, narrower Fo range, slower rate and the Fo curve is flat. The discrepancy of the three attitude polars is really quite small, for example, their Fo curve are very closed, even some words are repeated. Serious and neutral voice of mandarin is similar, and both of them are different with joking voice in the matter of Fo and Fo curve fluctuation.3. Polite vs. Rude:Both in Mandarin and Cantonese, the rate of polite attitude is slower than rude, both of them are faster than neutral reading, and Fo of polite is higher. We can say the expression of polite of Cantonese is well. The Fo feature of rude is lower than the rude of mandarin.4. Praising vs. Blaming:The Fo of these three polars of this kind of attitude expressed by Cantonese seems lower, praising attitude is higher than the other two polars. The discrepancy among the three polars is small. On rate parameters, there is no different between Cantonese and Mandarin.5.In this paper, attitudes expressed by mandarin is different because of the different expression style, the rate, Fo and the range of Fo in expressing attitude are significant. Compared with mandarin speech, Cantonese has lower Fo, narrower Fo range and slower rate.