Prosodic cues of emotionality in football commentaries: Pitch (based on Chinese)

Abstract

The paper reports the results of the first stage of a research aimed to obtain prosodic cues of emotionality in Chinese football commentary. The focus is on the distinctive features related to pitch: mean values, maximum and range. This is the first attempt to determine the tonal differences concerning pitch (F0) level and pitch range on neutral and emotional parts of Chinese football commentary, which accounts for the scientific novelty of the study. The results of acoustic and statistical data processing demonstrate a consistent increase of pitch level, maximum and range on emotional parts compared to neutral parts, which shows a clear correlation between the pitch values and the degree of emotionality. Deviations due to speaker-dependent variance were rare. The discovered pattern of the pitch parameters is common to the one found earlier for British and Russian football commentary. Therefore, the pattern should be considered universal.