A phonetic experimental study of different semantic functions in “zenme” questions

Abstract
In the past, the differences in the usage of the interrogative pronoun “zenme” mainly focused on the analysis of whether the interrogative pronoun carries focus information and stress, but the analysis results have not been proved by experiments. From the perspective of experimental phonetics, this paper studies the acoustic performance of interrogative pronoun “zenme” in the expression of interrogative and non-interrogative sentences. Through experiments it is found that the interrogative pronoun “zenme” cannot realize the sentence focus when asking the reason, asking the way of action and a rhetorical question, and is not suitable to carry the sentence stress. In the sentence expressing the meaning of asking the way of action, the predicate verb after “zenme” loads the sentence stress, the sentence focuses on the action behavior, and the boundary tone is highprofile. In the sentences expressing the meaning of asking reason and rhetorical questions, the content words at the end of the sentence are loaded with sentence stress, the sentence focuses on the pointed fact, and the boundary tone is low-key. In addition, in order to distinguish from sentences that purely ask for reasons, the range of the whole rhetorical question is be significantly expanded, i.e. The top points will become higher, the base points will become lower, and mainly the top points will become higher.

Keywords: focus, boundary, sentence stress, question, non-question.

For citation: Hu Liang, Xiong Ziyu. A phonetic experimental study of different semantic functions in “zenme” questions. Modern Oriental Studies. 2021; 3(3).