語篇韻律與上層訊息──兼論語音學研究方法與發現

Corpus Phonetic Investigations of Discourse Prosody and Higher Level Information

口語語流的超音段訊息中，除字調和句調外，還包含上層語篇訊息，形成韻律語境。我們提出「階層式多短語語流韻律HPG (Hierarchical Prosodic Phrase Grouping)」架構，分析並提取各韻律層級的聲學語音參數，包括基頻、音長與響度的韻律貢獻度，證明語流韻律係由各韻律層級系統性的層層疊加所共構。我們因而論述，研究語篇韻律：一、應將上層語篇訊息納入考慮，釐清韻律語境如何致使聲調與句調產生變異，解釋語流韻律之來源。二、可創新研究方法，結合語料庫語音學如何建構量化證據，提升語音學研究的科學性。三、結合質與量的研究，進一步瞭解超音段聲學語音體現的相對性意義。

This paper argues Mandarin discourse prosody must take into prosodic context from higher-level information in addition to lexical tones and phrase intonations. We postulate a prosody framework of Hierarchical Prosodic Phrase Grouping (HPG) and demonstrate how cumulative contributions from each prosody layer add up to output prosody. Cross-phrase prosodic templates corresponding to each HPG layer can be derived to represent the relative cross-phrase prosodic associations by three HPG specified relative positions (-initial, -medial and -final). In addition, we also discuss (1) how higher-level information is crucial to fluent speech prosody; (2) why corpus phonetics provides quantitative evidence to qualitative descriptions; and (3) how relative phonetic information can be better understood.