A Study of Chinese Tone System in A Reply to Su Wu

摘要

Yuqi, or termed Chinese tone system in a broad sense, means differently from both mood and modality in English. It not only refers to the way of speaking, such as interrogative and imperative, but also carries the speaker's own attitudes toward the utterance, which is usually called Kouqi in Chinese. Analyses of A Reply to Su Wu show that Chinese tone system can be studied at four levels. Ways including intoanation, rhythm, lexical devices, syntactic rhetorical devices, particular sentence patterns and discourse organization may all contribute to the realization of a tone.