Comparison Of Prosodic Features In Chinese Formal And Informal Speech

Register is a language mechanism used to determine or adjust social relationships and distances between the speaker and the hearer in communication.Chinese Register Grammar(CRG)maintains that languages of different registers have different grammars due to parallelism between function and form.Until now,based on CRG,many studies have reported grammatical differences in different registers in terms of lexicon,morphology and syntax.However,acoustic analysis in CRG is comparatively rare,especially in prosodic features of different prosodic categories.Thus,the present study conducted phonetic experiments to explore prosodic features of the formal and informal speech in terms of Prosodic Clitic,Prosodic Phrase and Intonational Phrase.Based on the definition of Register in CRG,this research designed 11 pairs of stimuli.Sentences within one pair for the formal and informal language are identical in syllable numbers(8-11 syllables),tonal combinations and syntactic structure.Twenty subjects are invited to participate in the production experiment: 10 Chinese announcers(the CA group)and 10 Beijing Mandarin speakers(the BS group),and the twp groups are gender balanced.According to given settings(relationship between the speaker and the hearer,occasion,content,attitude)of the communication,each produce stimuli naturally and frequently.Besides,two listeners have completed perception of pause and break of recordings.Results indicate that more pauses or breaks,longer syllable duration and larger pitch range are observed in the formal speech.Findings of prosodic features in each prosodic category are as follows.(1)At the prosodic clitic level,the formal speech has smaller clitic duration proportion than the informal speech.F0 contours of Fourth tone Clitics in the formal and informal speech are equal to neutral tone syllable.F0 contours of neutral tone clitics are level in the formal speech and falling in the informal speech.(2)At the prosodic phrase level,Prosodic phrase length are shorter in the formal speech since there are more possible positions and larger probabilities for break.Tone variation prediction from phonological rules and prominence prediction from syntactic analysis are only realized in the informal speech.(3)At the intonational phrase level,when there is a focus,two registers are identical in duration by increasing duration proportion of focus and decreasing proportion of pre-focus and post-focus.In the formal speech,focus would generate a F0 raising on the focus part and a substantial F0 decline on the post-focus part.In the informal speech,focus would generate a F0 raising on the prefocus part and the post-focus part.Besides,in the informal speech,the change of focus' s tonal combination has an influence on the post-focus F0 contours.The findings in the present study provide important implications for CRG.Until now,research on CRG has focused overwhelmingly on lexical and syntactic forms.Results of phonetic experiment reported in this paper show that differences in phonetic realization of prosodic categories are also observed in the formal and informal language.Thus,present study not only has verified previous research,but also has suggested that research on prosodic features should take register into consideration.