An Interface Research on Rhetorical Structure and Prosody Features in Chinese Reading Texts

This paper conducted an interface research on rhetorical and prosodic aspects of Chinese reading discourses within the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) framework. Ten discourses in 3 genres (Commentary, Narrative, and Descriptive) from the Annotated Speech Corpus of Chinese Discourse (ASCCD) were diagrammed in RST. The recordings from 5 males and 5 females were annotated and further analyzed acoustically and statistically by applying Praat and R. Distributions of rhetorical relations, nuclearity and stress degree in pre-pausal and post-pausal positions were examined in this current research. The statistical analysis results showed unbalanced distributions of rhetorical relations in different discourses, hierarchies and stress combinations. The examination of nuclearity showed different influences on pause duration, while stress degree combination does not. This interface research would benefit the semantic-based natural language to a great extent.