Acoustic features of Cantonese speech acts: prosodic evidence from words and sentences
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/TheLinguisticProceedings/2025/16/01/016/000676Keywords:
Cantonese, speech act, prosody, productionAbstract
Prosodic cues provide suprasegmental access to speech-act perception, yet they remain underexplored in tonal languages. This study analysed the production of six speech acts (Statement, Doubt, Suggestion, Command, Celebration, and Complaint) by twenty Cantonese-speaking adults. Mean F₀, F₀ range, intensity, and duration jointly achieved classification rates well above chance level, despite competition from lexical tone. Doubt and Suggestion exhibited the highest mean F₀ and widest pitch range, while Statement and Complaint occupied the lowest pitch region. Command showed the narrowest pitch range and greatest loudness, whereas Complaint displayed the longest duration. The findings confirm that global intonation, intensity, and timing reliably encode pragmatic force in Cantonese.
References
Austin, J. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford University Press.
Green, M. (2000). Illocutionary force and semantic content. Linguistics and Philosophy, 23, 435–473.
Hellbernd, N., & Sammler, D. (2016). Prosody conveys speaker’s intentions: Acoustic cues for speech act perception. Journal of Memory and Language, 88, 70–86.
Ma, J. K.-Y., Ciocca, V., & Whitehill, T. L. (2008). Acoustic cues for the perception of intonation in Cantonese. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2008 (pp. 520–523).
Searle, J. R. (1968). Austin on locutionary and illocutionary acts. The Philosophical Review, 77(4), 405–424.
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J., & Vanderveken, D. (1985). Foundations of illocutionary logic. Cambridge University Press.
Wu, W. L. (2009). Sentence-final particles in Hong Kong Cantonese: Are they tonal or intonational? In Proceedings of Interspeech 2009 (pp. 2291–2294).
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
