| According to the communicative functions,the main goal of this thesis is systematically investigated the prosodic encoding of tone,focus,and question intonation are co-encoded together in both acoustic and perception.The statement and question paradigm is used to control the focus position,in order to let subjects emphasize the correct corresponding target words in statement or question intonation.Across the systematic acoustic analysis and the statistical test.Overall,three types of the communicative function in Thai(Tone,Focus and Question Intonation)are encoded together in the way of communicative functions as follows:(1)The focus in statements has a certain overall pitch rise,but the focus in questions does not have an acoustic clue for the rasing of pitch.(2)The fundamental frequency contour of questions is higher than statements.(3)The rising of focus and questions does not change the tone shape in Thai.In short,the following main conclusions showed that:[1]The relation between the tone type and tone value of five tones in Thai showed that:low tone is lower than mid tone,basically as static tone;falling tone shows the characteristic of the high-falling,just drop only at the tone range;the fundamental frequency countour of rising tone is slightly drop and then dramatically rasied up in the end,basically as zigzag contour.The tone shape of high tone is high-rising,much more like a dynamic tone.The tone in Thai is also achieved by approaching the parallel encoding target.In addition,the following tone has no significant effect on the previous tone.In tone perception,the overall accuracy rate is very high.In contrast,low tone and falling tone perceived accuracy is lower than other tones;[2]There is no obvious pitch in focus components,and there is no post focus compression(PFC).There is certainly increased intonation of initial and final focus much more neutral focus for the whole sentence.The focus of question intonation has no pitch rising and post focus compression.This kind of result is similar with statements.Thus,Thai,like Deang,Wa and Vietnamese,lacking of the characteristics of post focus compression.The main role of focus in Thai is the lengthening of focus components and the increase of intensity.In Thai,the accuracy of focus perception is lower than that of random probability;[3]The rising of the questions in Thai increases the overall elevation of the subordinate clause,which is not consistent with the question intonation of Deang and Wa language in the same language family.Therefore,question intonation in Thai is the rising of the whole pitch,or only the rising at the end of the sentence,is more difficult to predict.The perception of question intonation is very high;[4]Focus does not change the tone shape.In Thai,focus is not marked by pitch,so focus will not affect the tone shape.In addition,focus has a certain pitch rise and an increase in the range,therefore,the effect of focus on Thai tone is systematic,that is,the relative pitch and the tone shape of each tone among focus positions are kept unchanged.Focus has no effect on tone perception;[5]The question intonation does not change the tone shape.In Thai,the question intonation is raising all of whole sentences,and the tone shape at the final syllable is kept relatively well.Therefore,the accuracy of tone perception in question intonation is relatively high;[6]The question intonation of each focus is higher than statements.We can say that,the position of focus does not affect the way of question intonation.In addition,in the statements and questions,there are no obvious changes of tone shape at the end of the sentence.For perception,it was found that,focus has no effect on the perception of intonation.In the end of the paper on the basis of the conclusion of Thai;firstly,the paper is touched on the prosodic encoding of focus in other languages such as Beijing dialect,Uygur,Cantonese,Vietnamese,Taiwanese,Deang and Wa and so on.At the same time,the relation between prosodic encoding of focus and some factor such as language family is discussed.Furthermore,issue of how tone and focus,focus and question intonation in Thai are co-encoded together is also discussed,and then the results of Cantonese,Uygur,and Wa are compared.The conclusions from the comparison support the "Parallel Encoding and Target Approximation"(PENTA).At the end,the issue of interaction between tone,focus and question intonation are also discussed,at the same time the results of Mandarin and Cantonese are compared. |
