How do Chinese speakers convey emotions by speech?

Question

In many languages, a tone conveys emotion. Thus, a word in the first tone might be perceived as conveying an easy-off emotion by a native Russian speaker; a word in the second tone might be most likely felt as a question by a native English speaker (provided both persons in both abstract examples are not familiar with Chinese), words in the third or fourth tone might be perceived by a native Russian speaker unaccustomed to Chinese as a question or command respectively.

In some languages, e.g. in Swedish (which is also a language of two-tone system, a little bit reminding that existing in Tibetan) an emotion is conveyed by intensity of speech, but not by tone.

In Finnish, which is almost a zero-tone language, an emotional meaning is conveyed mainly by a grammatical structure and/or lexical units, and sometimes by intensity of speech.

From my personal experience, I know that Chinese speakers, too, convey emotions in speech (e.g. when I was learning a Chinese verse, my teacher said that it sounds as if I were scolding somebody, so it's not about facial expression).

The question is, how do you convey emotions in Chinese? Is it possible to say something like 您好 but meaning actually 'go to hell', like in languages where an emotion is conveyed through a tone (e.g. in Russian / English)?

How do Chinese speakers perceive emotional states of each other in speech? Do they use tones, even altering them somehow, or do they use other means?

What is the spectrum of emotions covered by such means?

UPD: judging by this article, the emotional states are also culture-specific (e. g. there are no 'six basic facial expressions of six basic [Occidental] emotional states' for a native Chinese speaker) which complicates the issue a little bit.

Answer 1

How can Chinese express emotion if tones determine the meaning of a word? This should be one of the top 2 or 3 items on a Chinese language FAQ. It seems to be a constant source of puzzlement and a goad to much odd speculation.

The problem is that the word 'tone' when applied to Chinese does not mean what people think it does. Or perhaps people do not think carefully about what they think tone means when speaking of it in their own language.

For most people, it seems that tone is simply emotion embedded in language. This is much too simplistic to provide any insights into how we judge emotion in speech. What is an angry or frightened tone? Put in these terms, it's purely subjective.

For Chinese tones, however, it is possible to give a much more objective statement of what they consist of. Jerry Norman's book Chinese (published by Cambridge UP) gave what I thought was a very clear description: Tone consists of primarily of pitch, but duration and volume (Norman says intensity) are "important secondary cues." These are all relative, not absolute.

Much of what people tend to interpret as the emotional content of speech is in the departure of one of these from what has come before or what comes after.

This might seem puzzling, but perhaps a comparison with English might help. English indicates interrogative with a rising pitch. In contrast, many people interpret angry or strong emphasis with a falling pitch. Is it possible to ask an angry question in English? I think this is not at all difficult, using increased volume and duration and perhaps less of a rise in pitch than is common.

Emotional inflection in Chinese works in similar ways, with increased or decreased volume and duration. Pitch certainly does not work the way in Chinese that it does in English, and this can make it easy to misinterpret the emotional inflection of speech for those who do not know the language.

I have often heard learners complain that it sounds like Chinese speakers are arguing or angry all the time, and this was certainly my first impression when I heard people speaking in the Minnan dialect. In fact, however, I think that misjudging emotional content is common with most languages that one is unfamiliar with.

Answer 2

It is like you say "Shit", "Fucking". We are the same, we use "幹","他媽的" to convey strong emotions.

For example:

The fucking hot weather!

幹!這天氣真熱!

OR

幹!這天氣真他媽的熱!

In here we just curse the weather; that means the weather is very very hot.

There, you can count how much "curse words" the man used, and know how much hot weather the man feels.

We can use the same word to express different meanings with different tones.

Answer 3

As the other answers say, the whole story of expressing emotion though intonation is terribly complicated in any language. But here is a very articulate discussion of one aspect from ChinesePod concerning complex sandhi of third tones. I quote it since the web page may be available only to subscribers. It describes sandhi in a sentence, using 2 and 3 as tone numbers on the first four words 我 等你 等 as pronounced. Of course all these characters have assigned tone 3:

These tones below are what's usually said in this sentence and how it is meaningfully broken down.

我 等 你 等了 10 分鐘 了 。 3 2 3 3

However, the start of the sentence, 我, sounded like a second tone because the sentence was said emotionally.

It's same when you say 我想你 in just regular tone. It would be 323.

If somebody is really emotionally yelling this out it would sound like 223 as well.

This is in the context of a new series they put up on on pronunciation, called Say It Right, which is worth looking at.