A Prosodic and Perceptional Study on the Chinese Interrogative Pronoun “Shen Me” When Indicating Inquiry, Free Reference and Negation (in Chinese)

Abstract

This paper makes a comprehensive investigation and comparison of the prosodic and perceptual performance of the interrogative pronoun " shen me " when indicating question, free reference and negation. The results show that the prosodic performance of the sentence using " shen me " to indicate a question is similar to the prosody of an interrogative sentence; the sentence using " shen me " to indicate free reference has the intonation of a declarative sentence with the focus stress on “ dou ”; and the sentence using " shen me " to indicate negation has the intonation of an exclamatory sentence with focus stress on " shen me " or the predicative verb “ suan ”. The results of these perceptual experiments show that the acoustic differences of " shen me " won’t affect the listener’s judgement of the mood of the original sentence, but will affect the judgement of its naturalness to a certain extent. Combining acoustic and perceptual performance, “shen me” indicating a question and free reference carries natural stress, and " shen me " indicating negation carries emphatic stress. The three functions of " shen me " should be discriminated using multi-dimensional standards, that is, both prosody and perception. Additionally, the prosodic standard should include pitch, duration and intensity.