Contents

Acknowledgements

Abstract

摘要

Chapter One Introduction-1

1.1 Background-1

1.2 Significance of the Study-1

1.3 Orgnization of the Thesis-1

Chapter Two Literature Review-2

2.1 Key Terms and Relevant Issues-2

2.1.1 Prosody -2

2.1.2 Prosodic Patterns-2

2.1.3 Wh-questions-3

2.2 Relevant Theoretical Studies-3

2.2.1 Prosody of English and Chinese-3

2.2.2 Studies of Wh-questions in English and Chinese-4

2.3 Previous Studies-5

2.3.1 Study of Prosodic Patterns in English-5

2.3.2 Study of Prosodic Patterns in Chinese-5

Chapter Three The Contrastive Study on the Prosodic Patterns of Wh-questions in Chinese and English-7

3.1 Prosodic Patterns of Wh-questions in English-7

3.1.1 Tonality-7

3.1.2 Tonicity-7

3.1.3 Tone-7

3.2 Prosodic Patterns of Wh-questions in Chinese-8

3.2.1 Tonality-8

3.2.2 Tonicity-9

3.2.3 Tone-9

3.3 Similarities of Prosodic Patterns of Wh-questions Between English and Chinese-10

3.3.1 Tonality-10

3.3.2 Tonicity-10

3.3.3 Tone-11

3.4 Differences of Prosodic Patterns of Wh-questions Between English and Chinese-11

3.4.1 Tonality-11

3.4.2 Tonicity-12

3.4.3 Tone-12

Chapter Four Conclusion-13

4.1 Major Findings-13

4.2 Implications-13

4.3 Limitations of the Research-14

References-15

Abstract

Prosodic patterns are put forward based on the speech of human behaviors. It can be divided into three main parts: the tone, the time-domain distribution and stress. Wh-questions have always been a hot issue in philosophy, logic, academics and linguistics for a long term. In linguistics, a great number of scholars have analyzed the English and Chinese wh-questions from various aspects and multi-angles. Their study of wh-questions mainly focused on the classification of wh-questions, syntactic structure, semantic and pragmatic functions. At present, prosodic study abroad mainly along two directions, one study of prosody is acoustic correlates; the other is to study the role of prosody in speech exchanges. In recent years, many domestic researches, particularly research on the interaction between speech production phenomena, indicate that not only suprasegmental (prosodic) features and characteristics of the question segment influence each other, and the three main parameters of prosodic patterns are dependent. Wh-questions are one of the commonly used sentence patterns, which have the theoretical and practical significance for teaching and research by exploring their prosody and pronunciation principles. However, so far, there are few studies of wh-questions from the perspective of prosody. This thesis attempts to study the prosody patterns of wh-questions in English and Chinese from the perspective of prosody.

This thesis is formed of four parts: the first chapter is to introduce the background, the significance and the structure of this thesis. The second chapter is a literature review, covering some key terms and theories, the related theoretical researches and previous studies. The third chapter is the main body of this thesis, mainly analyzes the prosody. The last chapter is a conclusion, including the key findings, research limitations and suggestions for the future research.

Key words:  Wh-questions  Prosodic patterns  Tonality  Tonicity  Tone