期刊名称：Revista Virtual de Estudos da Linguagem - ReVEL
电子版ISSN：1678-8931
出版年度：2010
卷号：8
期号：15
出版社：Gabriel de Ávila Othero
摘要：This paper presents the results of a study of nuclear tone usage/variability in a spoken corpus of English TV commercials advertising household consumer products. Twenty adverts were recorded from British TV channels and analysed combining auditory analysis with a visual inspection of F0 contours/traces. The rates of occurrence of five types of tone (fall, rise, fall-rise, rise-fall, and level) were calculated for four utterance types (declaratives, questions, exclamatives, and imperatives). Results show that declaratives exhibit falling tones in most cases, followed by exclamatives and imperatives. Moreover, the rates of occurrence of tone types in exclamatives and imperatives generally mirror those in declaratives, compound tones being rare across all utterance types. An explanation of the presence or absence of a given tone in a specific grammatical structure is provided by relating tone variation with the specific pragmatic context of each sample
