Article published in:
International Journal of Chinese Linguistics
Vol. 6:1 (2019) ► pp. 1–26

Clause type anticipation based on prosody in Mandarin

| Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies | Leiden University Centre for Linguistics
| Leiden University Centre for Linguistics
| Leiden University Centre for Linguistics | Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition
| Leiden University Centre for Linguistics | Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition
Mandarin wh-words such as shénme are wh-indeterminates, which can have interrogative interpretations (‘what’) or non-interrogative interpretations (i.e., ‘something’), depending on the context and licensors. For example, when diǎnr (‘a little’) appears right in front of a wh-word, the string can have either a wh-question or a declarative interpretation (henceforth, wh-declarative). Yang (2018) carried out a production study and the results showed that wh-questions and wh-declaratives have different prosodic properties. To investigate whether and when listeners make use of prosody to anticipate the clause type (i.e., question vs. declarative), we conducted a sentence perception study and an audio-gating experiment. Results of the perception study and the gating experiment show that (1) Participants can make use of prosody to differentiate the two clause types; (2) Starting from the onset of the first word of the target sentence (wh-question/wh-declarative), participants already demonstrate a preference for the clause type that was intended by the speaker. The current study also sheds light on the clausal typing mechanism in Mandarin (e.g., how to mark a clause as a wh-question) by providing evidence of the role of prosody in marking clause types in Mandarin.
Keywords: Mandarin wh-declarative/wh-question, clause type anticipation, prosody, perception and gating paradigm, clausal typing
Published online: 02 July 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijchl.18004.yan
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