An OT Analysis Of The Intonation Mode Of English News Reading By Cantonese EFL Learners

In the Cantonese dialect area,Cantonese Intonation has negative transfer to English intonation obviously.Influenced by the Cantonese dialect,the native Cantonese speakers have formed their own unique intonation of English.The main purpose of this thesis is to find the answers to the following questions:1.What are the characteristics of the intonation mode of Cantonese EFL learners and native English speakers separately?And what are the differences between the two different intonation modes?2.What are the specific manifestations of the negative transfer of native language in the English news reading by Cantonese EFL learners?3.What are the relevant phonological constraints in OT?Optimality Theory?of the two different intonation modes?What are the differences in the ranking of the intonation modes'constraints?The thesis consists of seven chapters.Chapter 1 is the introduction part,which includes the motivation and the significance of the study and the organization of the thesis.Chapter 2 is about literature review.In this part,previous studies on Chinese EFL learners'intonation,previous studies on negative transfer of Chinese dialects'intonation to English intonation and studies about OT Analysis of intonations are reviewed in order.In addition,based on the literature,the author summarizes the characteristics of English's intonation mode and Cantonese's intonation mode and points out the differences between these two intonation modes.And the author also puts forward her own hypotheses according to the previous summary.Chapter 3focuses on the theoretical framework of this research,that is,the Optimality Theory?OT?.Chapter 4 presents the design of phonetic experiments in this research,including subjects,reading materials,instruments and data collection.Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 is the main part of the thesis.Chapter 5 is about results,analysis and discussion of phonetic experiments in this research and Chapter 6 is OT analysis of the intonation mode of English news reading by Cantonese EFL learners.Chapter 7 is the final chapter,talking about the research findings,the limitations as well as the suggestions for further researches.This present study is an OT analysis of the intonation mode of English news reading by Cantonese EFL learners.A phonetic experiment is conducted first.14freshmen from Guangdong Province,who are all Cantonese EFL learners,are invited to do the recording in the phonetic experiment.Then,the author applies OT to make a further analysis of the intonation mode of English news reading by Cantonese EFL learners.And the research findings are as follows:1.As for the characteristics of intonation of English news reading,the native English speaker has few pauses within the words in a sentence.Usually,there are only one intonation group in the native English speaker's news reading and high fall tone is adopted for the nucleus.Cantonese EFL learners have many pauses within the words in one sentence.And there are often more than two intonation groups in Cantonese EFL learners'news reading and they adopt low rise tone for the nucleus.2.There are four main differences between the intonation mode of English news reading by the native English speaker and that by Cantonese EFL learners.Firstly,as for the durations of reading,it takes Cantonese EFL learners more time to finishing reading the same material than the native English speaker.Secondly,there are more intonation groups in Cantonese EFL learners'news reading compared with that of the native English speaker.Thirdly,for the locations and nucleus tones,there are huge differences between subjects in two groups and the Cantonese EFL learners always adopt low rise tone for the nucleus while the native speaker adopts high fall.Finally,the overall pitch pattern slopes of Cantonese EFL learners are more complicated than that of the native English speaker.3.The relevant phonological constraints of the intonation modes are as follows:four markedness constraints:ALIGN-XP?R?,WRAP-XP,ALIGN-Foc and BIN-MAP,and three faithfulness constraints:MAX_int-IO,IDENT_int-IO and DEP_int-IO.The ranking of the constraints of the intonation mode of English news reading by Cantonese EFL learners is definitely different from that of the native English speaker.And the ranking of the constraints for English news reading is:IDENT_int-IO,MAX_int-IO,ALIGN-Foc>>DEP_int-IO>>WRAP-XP,BIN-MAP,ALIGN-XP?R?.What's more,the Cantonese EFL learners only obey the markedness constraint WRAP-XP and the faithfulness constraint DEP_int-IO and violate the other constraints.And the ranking of the constraints for the intonation outputs from Cantonese EFL learners is:ALIGN-XP>>MAX_int-IO>>ALIGN-Foc>>IDENT_int-IO>>BIN-MAP>>DEP_int-IO>>WRAP-XP.