Emotional Intonation in a Tone Language: Experimental Evidence from Chinese

Chinese is a tonal language. How lexical tones and intonation interplay with each other is an interesting question. In this study, we investigated emotional intonations by analyzing monosyllabic utterances from two speakers. We found that the tonal space, the edge tone and the duration differ greatly across 7 emotions, and that different speakers showed consistent production patterns. The speakers expressed „Disgust‟ or „Angry‟ by using a kind of „Falling‟ successive addition tone, and „Happy‟ or „Surprise‟ by a kind of „Rising‟ successive addition tone, as pointed out by Chao [1]. The function of the successive addition boundary tone is to express the speaker‟s emotion rather than linguistic information. We show that it is more reasonable to use both traditional boundary tone features (H% or L%) and the successive addition tone features (r, f or le) to describe boundary tones of emotional intonation. For instance, „H-f%‟ stands for a high boundary tone but with a falling successive addition tone.