Intonational realization of declarative questions in Bai

TY - CONF

T1 - Intonational realization of declarative questions in Bai

AU - Liu, Zenghui

AU - Van De Velde, Hans

AU - Chen, Aoju

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2018, International Speech Communications Association. All Rights Reserved.

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

N2 - This study investigates intonational realization of declarative questions in Southern Bai, a Sino-Tibetan tone language spoken in the southwest of China, by using a semispontaneous experimental approach. Our data shows that Bai speakers use prosody by lengthening the duration, expanding the pitch span, and raising the pitch maximum and minimum of the sentence-middle constituents to distinguish declarative questions from statements, regardless of focus condition. However, they vary the use of pitch span and pitch minimum with different lexical tones. These results thus suggest that sentence-medial prosody is different between statements and declarative questions in Bai. Furthermore, the modification of prosodic cues for encoding interrogativity appears to be sensitive to lexical tones in Bai.

AB - This study investigates intonational realization of declarative questions in Southern Bai, a Sino-Tibetan tone language spoken in the southwest of China, by using a semispontaneous experimental approach. Our data shows that Bai speakers use prosody by lengthening the duration, expanding the pitch span, and raising the pitch maximum and minimum of the sentence-middle constituents to distinguish declarative questions from statements, regardless of focus condition. However, they vary the use of pitch span and pitch minimum with different lexical tones. These results thus suggest that sentence-medial prosody is different between statements and declarative questions in Bai. Furthermore, the modification of prosodic cues for encoding interrogativity appears to be sensitive to lexical tones in Bai.

KW - Bai

KW - Declarative question

KW - Intonation

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85050212091&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2018-25

DO - 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2018-25

M3 - Paper

AN - SCOPUS:85050212091

SP - 124

EP - 128

T2 - 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody, SP 2018

Y2 - 13 June 2018 through 16 June 2018

ER -