Topic and Prosody Interaction in Chinese Discourse
Yuan Jia, Xiaoxiao Ma · 2018
This paper investigates how different types of topic information would influence the characteristics of prosody in Chinese reading texts. We are mainly concerned about three categorizations of topic. From the semantic point of view, we divide topics into three categories: cross-sentence topic, sentence topic and clause topic, differing in the scope of semantic continuation. According to the discourse hierarchy, we can further classify topic into paragraph-initial topic, sentence-initial topic, clause-initial topic and clause-middle topic. Further, topics can also be divided into kernel argument topic and circumstantial argument topic, involving different types of semantic roles. We then examine the prosodic features of the above categorizations of topics through an empirical study. Our results show that the stress distribution and pause distribution of the cross-sentence topic are significantly different from that of sentence topic and clause topic. Compared with circumstantial argument topic, kernel argument topic is more inclined to be unstressed and the pause after it is shorter. In addition, the discourse hierarchy significantly affect the prosodic features of topic: as the discourse hierarchy increases or decreases, the stress level and the pause level of the topic will be higher or lower accordingly.