Experimental contrastive research of English and Chinese intonation
The paper presents the results of instrumental and auditory analysis of Chinese intonation in comparison with the English intonation. Prosodic features of the Chinese language are considered not only from the point of view of their morpho-phonological distinguishing function, but also from the point of view of relating communicative intention in speech. On the basis of auditory analysis, a corpus of samples of native speakers’ utterances representing different tonemic forms and belonging to different communicative types was selected. Prosodic and temporal features were analysed with the help of the programme «Speech Analyser ». Illustrating tonogrammes are presented in the paper. The perception of the stimuli was investigated in the cross-linguistic experiment. The research shows that there are both common and differential prosodic features of speech in the two contact languages. They may lead to interference or to positive transfer of pronunciation habits from the native tongue to the target language. Such a comparison is relevant for teaching English intonation to the students from China and teaching Chinese intonation to the native speakers of English.