Interaction of Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics on Discourse Prosody in Standard Chinese

摘要

The interface of discourse structure and prosody has been increasingly regarded as an important research area, with abundant studies conducted to account for prosodic features on the discourse level. Still, the key issue of whether discourse structure on different linguistic layers exert intertwined effect on prosodic features remains unsolved, since most existing studies focused merely on a single layer. The present study aims to investigate the interactive effect of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors on prosody in Chinese discourse. Specifically, the effects of syntactic function, centering structure and information structure on stress and boundary distribution are examined through log linear analysis. Materials selected from the Annotated Speech Corpus of Chinese Discourse (ASCCD) are annotated following a multilayered annotation scheme. The results indicate that, apart from the individual effect of each aforementioned factor, interactive effects of centering structure and information structure on both stress and boundary distributions are observed. This finding highlights the significance of an interactive perspective towards prosody studies on the discourse level.