汉语韵律短语切分及语调降阶和下倾研究

Firstly, prosodic boundaries of 1991 common sentences were labeled based on speech perception experiment, relation between prosodic structure and syntactic structure was examined after immediate constituent analysis, an example of prosodic phrasing from text sentences was provided using CART. Then, using designed sentences, phenomena of downstep and declination in pitch downtrend of Chinese declarative sentences were examined, commonness and speciality of Chinese intonation were discussed. The main results of the study are: 1 The distribution patterns of prosodic phrase boundaries for different syntactic structures are different, and there is great freedom in prosodic chunking. The relation between syntactic structure and prosodic structure can only be discussed in statistical sense. 2 Besides of syntactic relation, the second most important factor which influences prosodic phrase boundaries is length. The distances to the front boundary and the back boundary are more important than the lengths of the left syntactic contituent and the right one. In our corpus, the length distributions of prosodic phrases are 5±3 syllables. 3 Automatic downstep can lower intonation linearly, but is affected by stress easily. Non-automatic downstep lowers the higher part of pitch contours and has no effect on the lower one of the intonation. 4 The downtrend reason of low point is declination. The extent of declination relates to not only tones of low points, but also their positions in prosodic words, the baselines decline much faster when low point are in the initial position of a prosodic word. In long sentences, the baselines of prosodic phrases are the basic declination units, and the whole declination pattern of a sentence is related to syntactic relations between two neighboring prosodic phrases.