Intonational Pitch Features of Interrogatives and Declaratives in Chengdu Dialect

Abstract

As a representative of southwestern Mandarin, the Chengdu dialect has its own distinctive pitch features in phonology of tone and intonation. Research on the pronunciation and lexical tone of the Chengdu dialect has a long history with a certain amount of theoretical results. However, research on intonation of Chengdu dialect is still rare. The writer provides an acoustic analysis of research into intonational pitch features of interrogative and declarative sentences of Chengdu dialect, discussing the F0 contour at the final syllable (character) of each sentence to find out if the statement or question mood is carried by the edge tone as well as the pitch perturbation between lexical tone and intonation on it. The results of this acoustic analysis show that there exist statement and question mood of Chengdu dialect carried by the final syllable within an intonational phrase as well as the perturbation on the final syllable (character) by the coexistence of its lexical tone and intonation.