Phonetics of Speech Acts: A Pilot Study

Phonetics of Speech Acts: A Pilot Study �����Chih-lin Chuang ������������� Department of Foreign Languages and Literature National Sun Yat-sen University m001020003@student.nsysu.edu.tw Abstract This paper aims to investigate the effect of speech act and tone on rhythm. Participants were asked to produce four sets of words in five speech acts. PVI values of duration, pitch, and intensity were used to test the rhythm of vowels. Two main findings were concluded. First, speech act did not have any effect on rhythm, which may be caused by the fact that speech act were not performed on the controlled words in this study. Second, tone had an effect on rhythm in terms of pitch and intensity on some pairs. However, the comparison between the two pairs, tone1-tone2 and tone2-tone3, did not show any significant difference, which may be explained by the nature of phonetic features for tone1-tone2 pair while Chinese third tone sandhi for tone2-tone3 pair. However, this study only used the sets of words that had the same tone. Future studies can put more focus on different combinations of sets of words. Key words: speech act, tone, rhythm 1. Introduction The analysis of speech acts has been widely discussed since it was brought up by Austin (1962). A speech act consists of locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act (Austin, 1962). The main argument of speech acts have been focusing on semantic and syntactic domains. However, phonetic domain is little discussed. Though Searle (1965) further explored illocutionary act and proposed that the elements of function indicating device include stress and intonation contour, there was no further discussion related to phonetics. Therefore, in current study, it will examine speech acts in terms of phonetics. Rhythm is one of the issues that are dealt with in the field of phonetics. Pike (1946) and Abercrombie (1965, 1967) could be seen as pioneers in investigating the rhythm of language. They claimed that isochronism existed in all languages, and languages could be divided into two categories: stress-timed and syllable-timed. There have been abundant studies on speech rhythm. Grabe and Low (2000) investigated and compared different speech rhythms in eighteen languages. Since then, many scholars have been studying further deep into certain languages. For example, Deterding (2011) investigated the speech rhythm of Malay. So far, Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing (ROCLING 2012) 185 the focuses have been mainly on the differences of speech rhythms between languages and the issue of second language acquisition. There are also many studies on the reasons for different speech rhythms within one language. Accents are believed to be one of the possible factors which may affect the speech rhythm (Rathcke and Smith, 2011). Nonetheless, many possible factors remain undiscovered. Therefore, the current study discusses the effects of two possible factors, tone and speech act, on speech rhythm in Chinese. The purpose of the current study is to locate whether tone or speech act have effects on speech rhythm of vowels in terms of duration, pitch, and intensity. 2. …

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