An acoustic study on the effect of the interaction between intonation and lexical tones on the realization of Cantonese sentence-final particles

Abstract

Hong Kong Cantonese provides a fascinating case to the study of prosody because of its rich inventory of sentence-final particles (SFPs) that carry two levels of prosodic information: an inherent lexical tone and intonation. The present study examined the effect of the interaction between tone and intonation on the production of SFPs among native Cantonese speakers. Acoustic analyses were carried out to measure and compare: (1) interrogative and declarative SFPs that have the same underlying lexical tone, and (2) SFPs with their homophones. Results showed that there is an interaction between intonation and lexical tones within SFPs, such that the intonation contrasting declarative and interrogative sentences has an impact on the realization of the underlying lexical tones of the SFPs. However, such interaction is mainly caused by global pitch raising, rather than local pitch raising, signaling the interrogative status of the sentence.

Rachel K.Y. Tsui

Postdoctoral researcher

My main research interests are centered around infant language development, bilingualism, and cross-cultural/cross-language differences.