A preliminary study on the transcription of Chinese intonation

Much research work has been done on the theory of intonation, especially for non-tonal languages. Pitch in tone languages is multi-functional, so intonation theories based on non-tonal languages may be not quite suitable for tone languages. In this paper, a transcription approach for Chinese intonation is put forward, which is mainly based on the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) theory. Therefore the approach can be called C-AM approach. It is supposed that Chinese intonation is composed of pitch accents and boundary tones, which are marked by the combination of tonal register and tonal range. A finite-state grammar of Chinese intonation is proposed.