The Pitch Analysis of Imperative Sentences in Standard Chinese

Abstract

The present study investigates the intonational pattern of imperative sentence, especially those having intensive mood, such as ordering and forbidding in Standard Chinese. Grouping the sentences by length and focusing on the fundamental frequency, this paper tries to provide a description of pitch patterns of Chinese strong imperatives. Comparing to the declarative sentence, the pitch contour of the imperative sentence with strong mood is wholly raised, where the sentence stress rises more seriously, and the pitch range is compressed. The raising phenomenon has nothing to do with tonal differences or length of the sentence. The strong mood even changes the third tone to a rising tone when it is at the sentence final or in a one syllable sentence.