This chapter describes the initial stages of development of a Pan-Mandarin ToBI system. It reviews the salient prosodic characteristics of Mandarin, such as lexical tones, tone sandhi, tonal neutralisation, stress patterns, pitch range effects, and prosodic groupings above the syllable level. Particular attention is paid to the range of variability within a common structural core, in addition to points of reference to other varieties of Chinese and to other languages. It then proposes a codification of conventions for marking prosodic structure and an inventory of tones in two standard varieties (i.e. Putonghua of Mainland China and Guoyu of Taiwan) and one regional variety of the language (i.e. Rugaohua, a Jianghuai Mandarin variety). Also built into the system is the capability to accommodate interactions, such as code-switching events, between different varieties of Mandarin and perhaps between Mandarin and other varieties of Chinese (and other languages) in different social contexts.
This study examines the putative benefits of explicit phonetic instruction, high variability phonetic training, and their effects on adult nonnative speakers’ Mandarin tone productions. Monolingual first language (L1) English speakers (n = 80), intermediate second language (L2) Mandarin learners (n = 40), and L1 Mandarin speakers (n = 40) took part in a multiday Mandarin‐like artificial language learning task. Participants were asked to repeat a syllable–tone combination immediately after hearing it. Half of all participants were exposed to speech from 1 talker (low variability) while the other half heard speech from 4 talkers (high variability). Half of the L1 English participants were given daily explicit instruction on Mandarin tone contours, while the other half were not. Tone accuracy was measured by L1 Mandarin raters (n = 104) who classified productions according to their perceived tonal category. Explicit instruction of tone contours facilitated L1 English participants’ production of rising and falling tone contours. High variability input alone had no main effect on participants’ productions but interacted with explicit instruction to improve participants’ productions of high‐level tone contours. These results motivate an L2 tone production training approach that consists of explicit tone instruction followed by gradual exposure to more variable speech.
The Hong Kong Cantonese variety of Chinese (hereafter "Cantonese") poses an interesting challenge for prosodic typology and transcription for three closely interrelated reasons. First, compared to the Mandarin varieties of Chinese, Cantonese has far fewer polysyllabic wordforms. The majority of the syllables are potentially free-standing morphemes, and there is no contrast between "stressed" syllables and reduced ("neutral-tone") syllables. Second, there is an extremely dense syntagmatic specification of tone. Every syllable in an utterance has a lexical tone, even if it is a grammatical morpheme or pragmatic particle, and there is a rich inventory of non-segmental pragmatic morphemes ("boundary tones")
An important contribution to our knowledge of tone sandhi among the Chinese dialects is Lü's (1980) article on the tones and tone sandhi behaviour of Danyang, a Wu dialect of Chinese. Lü's description of Danyang is, to date, our only source on the dialect. While it is a northern Wu dialect, the tone sandhi patterning in Danyang differs from Shanghai, Suzhou, Wuxi and other dialects in the vicinity. There are a number of interesting problems related to tone in the dialect. This paper restricts the topic to only one of these problems, namely the treatment of the six basic tone patterns in Danyang, focusing in particular on the pattern in which a contour tone is copied Onto adjacent syllables in the tone sandhi domain.
In some dialects of Chinese and Miao, the nasals in syllable-initial position have been described as being accompanied by a homorganic stop, which are often transcribed with superscripts: [mb], [nd], and [ŋg], as a deliberate attempt to characterize these segments as phonetically distinct from prenasalized stops, [mb], [nd], [ŋg]. In our study, the acoustic nature of these “post-stopped” nasals will be explored, since no instrumental study has been conducted on them. A preliminary investigation of data from two Zhongshan Chinese speakers confirm that these nasals are different both perceptually and acoustically from the prenasalized stops in other languages. It is found that the so-called “stop” component in Zhongshan syllable-initial nasals is not a stop, but a burst that occurs simultaneous with the oral release following the nasal. Such bursts occur sporadically in English, but are consistently produced in the Zhongshan nasals, and are perceived as homorganic stops accompanying the nasals. The waveforms also show a characteristic shape, with a sharp rise in amplitude at vowel onset. The results suggest the precise synchronization of velic closure with oral release.
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