An Analysis of Prosodic Features of Chinese EFL Majors’ English Questions

Abstract

Drawing on the Auto-segmental Metrical theory in intonational phonology, this paper reveals the phonological structure of English interrogatives between Chinese EFL majors and native speakers from a syntactic pragmatic perspective, based on reading documents of eight English majors with Praat being its research tool. Findings show that the prosodic characteristics of interrogatives of English majors are obviously different from those of native speakers, which are mainly reflected in the segmentation of tone groups, boundary tone, intonation nucleus, and stress distribution. It purports to help English majors clarify the important pragmatic functions of intonation in information transmission and interpersonal communication, and foster strengths and circumvent weaknesses so as to better develop "Chinglish pronunciation" with Chinese characteristics; meanwhile, to bring enlightenment to English intonation teaching.