A Study Of Intonation On Chinese Joyous Emotion

Intonation is the indispensability rhythm characteristic for conveying ideas orfeelings, which is one of the important research topics of modern Phonetics andPhonology. Intonation is the melody patterns composed by not only the inflectionspecific to functional devices, but also other segment features such as sound durationand intensity. Intonation not only can express feelings and attitudes, but also suggestthe cultural and social backgrounds of utterers. Moreover, intonation plays animportant role in Chinese phonetics research and practical Chinese teaching.Therefore, going further in intonation study helps revealing the laws of phoneticsystem, meanwhile, it will prevent foreign learner from rigid intonation. At present,there are many publications and thesis in tone and intonation of intonation research, aswell as a lot of analysis in four types tones. However, it is a blank field of studyingintonation from the angle of emotion. Based on gathering linguistic data, this thesisstudies the intonation of sentences expressing joy in terms of emotion, from the pitchregister, pitch range, speed and stress of sentences expressing joy by data statisticsand data analysis using Praat and Excel. My study shows that: sentences expressingjoy are mainly low pitch register，narrow pitch range; furthermore, generally speaking,the broader the pitch range is, the slower the speed is; the accent of sentencesexpressing joy reflects in various forms, which can be located at the beginning,middle, end or over the whole sentence; the features of sentences expressing joy varyfrom different types of sentences. From comparison of neutral declarative sentences, Ifind that sentences expressing joy share the features of higher pitch register, broaderpitch range and slower speed.