Intonation Units and Declination Units in Taiwanese Discourse

• Main Authors: Wang, Su-chen, 王素貞
• Other Authors: Wen-yu Chiang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 1998
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/87951105044980233679

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 語言學研究所 === 86 === Abstract The thesis acoustically and empirically analyzes two kinds of prosodic units: IUs and DUs. Though they are both prosodically defined, scant literature concerns with their acoustic properties. Therefore, our study aims to acoustically investigate the prosodic features of IUs and DUs, which are then compared. Cues characterizing IUs are first discussed to probe into the issue of why some stretches of speech are difficult to break into IUs and why some are segmented differently by transcribers. In addition to the prosodic phenomena, grammatical structures of DUs are also investigated, which may provide insights of what the production of a DU tries to communicate. Finally, this thesis studies the relationship between IUs and DUs, including their sizes, grammatical structures and acoustic behaviors. Furthermore, how IUs flow within a DU is discussed. Two Taiwanese conversations, 26 minutes in total, serve as the data examined. Two experiments are performed on the first conversation with the length of 5 min and 45 sec. They are designed to answer questions regarding IUs' prosodic features. Our results indicate that some acoustic properties do serve as indicators to IU boundaries. It is found that speakers accelerate their speech in the initial of an IU, decelerate it near the end and then may sometimes remain silent for a while before initiating anot her IU. In addition to the change of speech tempo, Fo movement also characterizes IUs --- they are found to manifest declination as well as pitch resetting in the beginning. In the first experiment, the percentage of transcribers' agreement on IUs' breaking is below 70%. Two reasons, individual preference for different cues, together with the relative importance of these prosodic cues, are examined to account for the low tendency of agreement. It is found that one transcriber relies on the cue of pause much more than others do, while another subject more depends upon the cue of anacrusis. On the top of that, when the cues of pause and final lengthening are not salient enough, people delineate speech differently. The results all indicate one thing in common that speech timing in Taiwanese is relatively more important in serving as the function of structuring speech. The second conversation results in 336 DUs in total. They show some prosodic features, as IUs do. Although DUs are characterized by the same prosodic features as IUs are, some of these features in DUs are more prominent than those in IUs. First, the boundary pauses of DUs are significantly longer than boundary-within pauses. Second, Fo development in DUs is quite different from that in IUs. DUs show greater extent of declination and pitch resetting than IUs do. The results imply that it is not presenc e or absence of the prosodic features but the magnitude of them that differentiate DUs from IUs. Although the two units share acoustic features with different strength, their realizations in grammatical structures and their sizes are different. More than 70% of all DUs are either simple clauses or clause-complexes, while IUs are phrases or simple clauses at most. Their differences in syntactic structures also suggest the difference in sizes. On average, a DU contain 11.58 syllables while an IU 5.68. On average, a DU is made up of two IUs. The flowing of IUs within a DU is found to be unbalanced in terms of the quantity of information. The first IU per DU tends to be shorter and contains fewer syllables than the last IU does. Nevertheless, one of the results shows a weighty head phenomon --- syllables in the first IUs are on average longer than those in the last IUs. The sequence of IUs also exerts an effect on prosodic realizations. The final IUs demonstrate a greater extent of declination but les s extent of resetting and final lengthening, while the initial IUs are verbalized with less strength of declination but greater extent of final lengthening. In addition to the difference between the first and last IU of a DU, the first pitch and last pitch of each IU are also found to decline across the whole DU. Keywords: Intonation, Prosody, Prosodic Units