How Sound Correlates with Meaning: An Analysis on Mandarin Chinese Final Particle a

This study investigates the relation between pitch realization and pragmatic function/meaning in Mandarin Chinese final particle a. Based on Shie [7] and Liu [6], nineteen pragmatic functions were adopted and re-designed. Two different groups of participants, native speakers (L1) and foreign learners (L2) who were learning Mandarin Chinese were recruited. Result showed that there was a strong Language effect, which referred that participants with different backgrounds relied on distinct cues, such as duration, pitch range, slope for L1 and pitch range for L2. It also indicated that pitch range was the most salient feature of final a in tonal recognition. Although the one-to-one mapping between pitch and pragmatic functions was not remarkably observed, the tonal result tended to support Wu’s [9] classifications compared with two studies mentioned above.