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Part of
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vietnamese Linguistics
Edited by Nigel Duffield, Trang Phan and Tue Trinh
[Studies in Language Companion Series 211] 2019
► pp. 9–30

Chapter 2
Intonation in southern Vietnamese interrogative sentences

| Ho Chi Minh city University of Education, Vietnam
| University of Ottawa, Canada

This study looks at the acoustic cues that characterize the intonation of questions in southern Vietnamese. We find a raised f0 height and a rising contour in a third of interrogatives, but – with the exception of alternative (and some open) questions – we argue that these properties cannot distinguish interrogatives from other sentence types. The only cue systematically associated with questions is that they tend to have a faster speech rate. Our findings replicate recent studies conducted on northern Vietnamese showing that there are idiosyncratic differences in the realization of intonation and that intonation may not be as grammaticalized as in Western languages. Vietnamese interrogatives are marked with particles or inferred from context and their intonation plays an ancillary role.

Keywords: southern Vietnamese, spontaneous speech, interrogatives, intonation, acoustic study
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The tonal system of southern Vietnamese
    • 1.2Cao Xuân Hạo’s classification of Vietnamese interrogatives
    • 1.3Intonation in Vietnamese interrogatives
    • 1.4Research questions
  • 2.Method
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Research question 1: Do interrogatives have a higher f0 than declaratives? Do they have a different contour?
      • 3.1.1Overall f0 level
      • 3.1.2Global f0 slope
      • 3.1.3Local f0 slope
    • 3.2Research question 2: Are interrogatives spoken at a faster speech rate than declaratives?
    • 3.3Research question 3: Are there any differences in pitch (height and contour) between different types of interrogatives?
      • 3.3.1Overall f0 level
      • 3.3.2Global f0 slope
      • 3.3.3Local f0 slope
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 9 October 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.211.02ha
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