Abstract
Chinese intonation is reflected by adjusting the types of pitch, duration and intensity variants of a series of syllables. The purpose of present study is to compare the difference between yes/no questions with or without particle. The method of experimental phonetics was applied to investigate the performance of pitch, duration and intensity of questions. The results showed that since the particle (“吗”) played the main role in conveying the question information, it is not necessary for the particle to enhance its prosodic elements at the same time, while the question without particle had to improve its pitch, duration and intensity of the final meaningful syllable to realize the interrogative effect.
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Huang, J., Zhang, G. (2019). A Study on Prosodic Distribution of Yes/No Questions with Focus in Mandarin. In: Tang, J., Kan, MY., Zhao, D., Li, S., Zan, H. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing. NLPCC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11838. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32233-5_44
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