The 9th International Conference on English Language Teaching (ELT) In China (ELT2020)

"Focus" is the core of narration and has an important role in phonology, syntax, phonetics, discourse analysis, etc. Focus can be expressed by means of phonetics, but the realization of focus in different language are different (Van Saline & Lapolla 1997). Lin et al. (2017) compared the focus of English and Chinese in terms of phonological expression and phonetic realization. Wang (2019) compared the focus in interrogative sentences between Chinese and Indonesian through phonetic experiments. However, the influence of location has been ignored. Besides, the relationship among pitch, duration and intensity has not been analyzed.
Based on intonation-pattern theory (Shi 2013), this paper employs pitch range ratio, duration ratio and intensity ratio as measurements to compare the phonetic realization of semantic focus between Chinese and English. The aim is to analyze the influence of location and the relationship among pitch, duration, and intensity. The results show that: 1) Chinese manifests a salience sequence of duration > pitch range > intensity, while English has a salience sequence of pitch range > duration > intensity. 2) Chinese emphasizes the verbs in sentences, whose hierarchy is expressed as middle position> initial position> final position; while English weakens the performance of middle verbs, the hierarchy of which is shown as final position >initial position> middle position. This study is of great significance for speech synthesis and pronunciation teaching.
 

contrastive study,semantic focus,experimental phonetics,intonation-pattern theory