The prosodic marking of rhetorical questions in Standard Chinese

Abstract

The present study investigates the prosody of information-seeking (ISQs) and rhetorical questions (RQs) in Standard Chinese, in polar and wh-questions. Like in other languages, ISQs and RQs in Standard Chinese can have the same surface structure, allowing for a direct prosodic comparison between illocution types (ISQ vs RQ). Since Standard Chinese has lexical tone, the use of f0 as a cue to illocution type may be restricted. We investigate the prosodic differences between ISQs and RQs as well as the interplay of prosodic cues to RQs. In terms of f0, results showed that RQs were lower in f0, with the f0 range on the first word being expanded followed by f0 compression. RQs were further longer in duration and more often realized with non-modal voice quality (glottalized voice) as compared to ISQs. These prosodic cues were largely manipulated in tandem (illocutionary pairs with larger durational differences also showed larger differences in mean f0; voice quality, in turn, seemed to be an additional cue). We suggest three possible explanations (assertive force, focus, speaker attitude) that unite the present findings on RQs in Standard Chinese with the findings on RQs in other, non-tonal languages.

Voice quality and speaking rate in Icelandic rhetorical questions

“…This paper deals with phonetic differences between information-seeking questions (ISQs) and rhetorical questions (RQs) in Icelandic, specifically voice quality (VQ) and speaking rate/global duration, focusing on polar and wh-questions. The prosody of the two illocution types (ISQs, RQs) has recently been compared for several languages, among them English (Dehé & Braun 2020b), German (Braun et al 2019), Standard Chinese (Zahner et al 2021), French (Beyssade & Delais-Roussarie, to appear), Estonian (Asu, Sahkai & Lippus 2020), Italian (Sorianello 2018(Sorianello , 2019, Cantonese (Lo, Kiss & Tulling 2019), Japanese (Miura & Hara 1995) and Icelandic (Dehé, Braun & Wochner 2018, Dehé & Braun 2020a; see Dehé et al (2022) for an overview. These studies show that speakers make use of the same prosodic parameters to indicate rhetorical meaning across languages: F0, constituent duration/speaking rate, and VQ.…”

“…For example, breathy VQ occurs in sentence-initial position in German polar and wh-RQs (Braun et al 2019) and English wh-RQs (Dehé & Braun 2020b). In Chinese, glottal VQ occurs more frequently in RQs than in ISQs in both initial and final positions (Zahner et al 2021). In German, VQ also distinguishes between questions and statements in general (e.g.…”

Testing Acoustic Voice Quality Classification Across Languages and Speech Styles

“…The main data are drawn from [30], which consists of 1737 vowels utterances from 10 female speakers from Beijing. The recordings were done in a quiet room using a headset microphone Shure SM10A and were digitized onto a computer with 44.1 kHz, 16 Bit.…”

“…We hence included 109 breathy-voice vowels (produced by 10 female speakers) from a similar experiment for German [9]. The German recordings were done in a sound-attenuated cabin at the PhonLab of the University of Konstanz with the same recording device as in [30]. The recordings were annotated for voice quality on all content words by one annotator (agreement for 20% of the data by a second annotator was 89.7%, κ = 0.71, which is substantial [31]).…”

Research on Automatic Recognition of Rhetorical Questions’ Types in Modern Chinese Texts

“…Rhetorical Question is often translated as "fanwen ju" in Chinese. Rhetorical questions have been a hot topic of linguistic research in China and abroad, focusing on the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and rhythmic properties of rhetorical questions and how to distinguish them from "real" questions [5][6][7]15,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. Subsequently, the researcher shifted their focus towards the discourse function of rhetorical questions [13,[31][32][33][34].…”