The Prosodic Characteristics of Standard Chinese Rhetorical Questions in Naturalistic Settings

The current study investigated the prosodic features of rhetorical questions in Standard Chinese within naturalistic settings, utilizing data collected from 103 native Mandarin speakers. String-identical information-seeking questions (ISQs) and rhetorical questions (RQs) were recorded through an online platform, ensuring a diverse and representative sample. The results revealed that, when freely reading aloud to the phone, speakers tended to convey rhetorical meaning by either shifting prominence toward or enhancing the prominence of the verb or modal verb. Acoustically, the prominent verbs were characterized by higher pitch and longer duration. In other positions, phonetic markers varied depending on the sentence structure. Our large-sample findings highlight the interface of prosody and syntax in conveying communicative intention. This research also addresses a critical gap by moving beyond laboratory-based data to examine speech phenomena in more ecologically valid contexts.