汉语正反问句的韵律研究

Prosody in Chinese Positive-Negative Interrogatives

汉语正反问句,如“你读不读诗歌”,是用一个否定成分连接前后重复的成分,是一种形式上比较独特的问句。现有对汉语正反问句的研究多集中在历时演变及句法生成上,尚缺乏语音及韵律角度的研究。本文结合汉语语法,运用Truckenbrodt的疑问句韵律焦点效应理论分析现代汉语正反问句的韵律特点,并通过语音分析验证该理论对这类问句分析的可行性。

Such positive-negative interrogative as “你读不读诗歌” (a.k.a A-not-A question), a particular kind of interrogative in form, is constructed through a negative marker linking two immediately neighboring elements which are repetitive of each other (these two neighboring elements not necessarily existing simultaneously). Current studies on positive-negative interrogatives focus mostly on their diachronic evolution and syntactic generation. However, few studies have been conducted so far in this field from the perspective of speech and prosody. This paper adopts Truchenbrodt’s Prosodic F-effects theory to explore the prosody of positive-negative interrogatives in modern Chinese, and moreover, to examine this theory’s feasibility of analyzing such sentence patterns.