Phonetics of Speech Acts: A Pilot Study

This paper aims to investigate the effect of speech act and tone on rhythm. Participants were asked to produce four sets of words in five speech acts. PVI values of duration, pitch, and intensity were used to test the rhythm of vowels. Two main findings were concluded. First, speech act did not have any effect on rhythm, which may be caused by the fact that speech act were not performed on the controlled words in this study. Second, tone had an effect on rhythm in terms of pitch and intensity on some pairs. However, the comparison between the two pairs, tone1-tone2 and tone2-tone3, did not show any significant difference, which may be explained by the nature of phonetic features for tone1-tone2 pair while Chinese third tone sandhi for tone2-tone3 pair. However, this study only used the sets of words that had the same tone. Future studies can put more focus on different combinations of sets of words. Key words: speech act, tone, rhythm 1.