Intonation of statements and question in Cantonese English: acoustic evidence from a smoothing spline analysis of variance

Abstract

This paper looks into the intonational use of pitch in Cantonese English. It aims at providing phonetic evidence for the intonation of statements and questions in interaction with tones identified at lexical level. A smoothing spline analysis of variance was fitted to the audio-recording data from six speakers of Cantonese English with R in order to generate smoothing splines at 95% confidence intervals for determining whether the same tone (M, H, or L) in different utterance types (context-neutral utterances, statements and questions) differ from each other significantly in different word positions and utterance positions. It is found that there are clear boundary targets for statements (L%) and questions (H%), indicating that there are different boundary tones. It also finds out that there is a lowering of pitch for tones in non-utterance-final words for questions than other utterance types, which creates an enhancing effect of a more salient H%.