A Preliminary Analysis of Focus and Ending in Chinese Intonation

The present paper investigates the issue of focus types and the ending situations in Chinese declarative and interrogative intonations. Differing only in focus of each, 5 statement sentences and 5 interrogative sentences with the same words and the same syntax in Chinese are designed for the experiment. A male Standard Chinese speaker reads them in random order three times. The results show that there are two types of foci in Chinese intonation: H* and L*, subject to Chinese lexical tone features. Besides, both H* and L* can be identified by the D-value between the two H peaks. In particular, the shift of the focus location seems to have effects on boundary tone H%. The findings in this research seem to be able to make Chinese intonation curves somewhat predictable.