Theo phonetics and phonology of apparent cases of iterative tonal change in Standard Chinese

Abstract

Standard Chinese has four lexical tones: high (H), low (L), rising (R) and falling (F). i There are also the so-called 'neutral-toned' syllables, often viewed as toneless, although see Chen and Xu 2004 for a dissenting view. The language has a well-studied rule that changes the first of two low tones to a higher rising tone. The rule is known as the third-tone sandhi rule. It applies whenever the two low tones are adjacent in a domain, where the domains are defined by a complex mixture of syntactic, prosodic, and focus-related factors. It is partially dependent on speech rate, so that a given utterance may have more than one way of applying the sandhi rule. In utterances with several low tones in a row, the rule may apply to some or all of them, depending on the factors just mentioned. For example, Chen (2000:386) gives two different pronunciations for this phrase: (1) /LLLH/ RLLH or RRLH [xiang [xie [xiao shuo]]] plan write novel 'to plan to write a novel'

Toward invariant functional representations of variable surface fundamental frequency contours: Synthesizing speech melody via model-based stochastic learning

“…This result is therefore slightly in favor of hypothesis A3, i.e., the most accurate representation of Mandarin third tone sandhi is as a separate tonal category. Surprisingly, this result agrees well with previous empirical findings that the sandhi-L tone is close but not identical to the R tone (Kuo et al, 2007;Peng, 2000;Xu, 1997) …”

The Role of Surface and Underlying Forms When Processing Tonal Alternations in Mandarin Chinese: A Mismatch Negativity Study

“…Across the experiments, they found the predicted asymmetrical MMN response elicited by conditions with tone 3, while no asymmetry was observed in conditions with other tones. Mandarin tone 3 has several properties that underspecified segments also have, such as surface alternation, low pitch register, and use as attentional cues (Kuo et al, 2007;Hsu et al, 2015;Politzer-Ahles et al, 2016). Politzer-Ahles et al (2016) argued that the putatively underspecified nature of tone 3 weakens the contrast between standards and deviants.…”

Timing and coordination in tone and intonation—An articulatory-functional perspective

“…In fact, even in languages like Mandarin, where mean syllable duration is around 180-200 ms (Xu, 1997(Xu, , 1999, in many cases, it is only barely possible to realize a dynamic tone at normal speaking rate. At fast speaking rate, syllable duration can become so short that dynamic tones are realized with virtually flat F 0 contours (Kuo et al, 2007 Xu and. Thus the distribution of dynamic tones across languages is likely closely related to the constraint of minimum duration of pitch movements.…”