A Narrative Inquiry into The comparisons of EnglisA Narrative Inquiry into The comparisons of Englis.docVIP

A Narrative Inquiry into The comparisons of English and Chinese intonation Candidate: Yunxi 云曦 school: Harbin Institute of Technology Specialty: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics 邮编: 150001 地址 哈尔滨市 南岗区 西大直街 92号 Abstract English and Chinese are in different language families, and they are also two totally different languages. The study of intonation has existed for a long time. The importance for the study of intonation lies in that foreign language learner always transfer their native language into the process of learning the target language. Chinese speak English in a way of Chinglish, while when foreigner speak Chinese they would make some pragmatic mistakes because of negating the change of intonation. So, the study of intonation plays an important role in the communication which the foreigners use a different language. The study of intonation not only plays a crucial role in the avoidance of making mistakes in cross cultural communication, but also promotes the development of phonetics and teaching method of phonetics, which has an important theoretical and practical meaning in the process of studying linguists. Keywords: intonation, stress, semantic, pragmatic, negative transfer This simple comparison makes a very important point about how we speak and use English or Chinese. It is believed that, English is considered as a stressed language while many other languages are considered as syllabic, such as, Chinese. What does that mean? It means that, we use stress to certain words in English while other words are quickly spoken. In other languages, such as French or Italian, each syllable receives equal importance. What’ more, Chinese is considered as a tone language which has four totally different tones. For example, 妈 马 骂 麻 are words with totally different meaning but with same syllables.  In terms of stress The meaning of Chinese words is determined by the ton