Analysis of telephone conversations within the framework of Conversation Analysis reveals that Vietnamese makes pragmatic use of intonational tones. Pitch contours on oneword utterances in backchannels, requests for information, turn exits and repair initiations are compared. Target words bear one of two lexical tones: the low-level tone thanh huyên or the high-level tone thanh ngang. Results shed light on the interaction between these tones and those used for signalling communicative functions (intonation). An autosegmental analysis of this interaction is provided.
Index Terms: prosody, tone-intonation interaction, Vietnamese, pragmatics
Cite as: Ha, K.-P., Grice, M. (2010) Modelling the interaction of intonation and lexical tone in Vietnamese. Proc. Speech Prosody 2010, paper 042
@inproceedings{ha10_speechprosody, author={Kieu-Phuong Ha and Martine Grice}, title={{Modelling the interaction of intonation and lexical tone in Vietnamese}}, year=2010, booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2010}, pages={paper 042} }