Article published in:
Above and Beyond the Segments: Experimental linguistics and phonetics
Edited by Johanneke Caspers, Yiya Chen, Willemijn Heeren, Jos Pacilly, Niels O. Schiller and Ellen van Zanten
[Not in series 189] 2014
► pp. 275–287

The independent effects of prosodic structure and information status on tonal coarticulation

Evidence from Wenzhou Chinese

| Universiteit Leiden
Various factors constrain the production of a sequence of lexical tones. This study aims to test the joint influence of three important ones: tonal coarticulation, prosodic structure, and information status. F0 realization of rising and falling tones, in both compatible and conflicting tonal contexts, was compared across two prosodic conditions (prosodic headedness and boundary depth) and two focus conditions (with vs. without narrow focus). Results show that in conflicting tonal contexts, where salient coarticulatory adjustment of F0 trajectories is to be expected, both prosodic structure and information status influenced the implementation of F0 slopes, albeit in different ways. These findings lend support to the proposal that information status and prosodic structure exert independent prosodic strengthening effects on tonal implementation.
Published online: 10 December 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.189.22sch
References
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D
(2001) Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International, 5(9/10), 341–345.Google Scholar
Brunelle, M
(2009) Northern and Southern Vietnamese tone coarticulation: A comparative case study. Journal of Southeast Asian Linguistics, 1, 49–62.Google Scholar
Byrd, D., & Saltzman, E
(1998) Intragestural dynamics of multiple prosodic boundaries. Journal of Phonetics, 26(2), 173–199. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cabré, T., & Prieto, P
(2005) Positional and metrical prominence effects on vowel sandhi in Catalan. In S. Frota, M. Vigário, & M.J. Freitas (Eds.), Prosodies. With special reference to Iberian languages (pp. 123–158). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Chang, Y.-C., & Hsieh, F.-F
(2012) Tonal coarticulation in Malaysian Hokkien: A typological anomaly? The Linguistic Review, 29(1), 37–73. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Chen, M.Y
(2000) Tone sandhi. Patterns across Chinese dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Chen, S., Wang, B., & Xu, Y
(2009) Closely related languages, different ways of realizing focus. In M. Uther, R. Moore, & S. Cox (Eds.), Proceedings of the 10th annual conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech), Brighton, UK (pp. 1007–1010).Google Scholar
Chen, Y
(2003) The phonetics and phonology of contrastive focus in Beijing Mandarin. PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook.Google Scholar
(2004) Focus and intonational phrase boundary in Standard Chinese. Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing, Hongkong, 41-44. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2006) Durational adjustment under corrective focus in Standard Chinese. Journal of Phonetics, 34(2), 176-201. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2009) Prosody and information structure mapping: Evidence from Shanghai Chinese. Chinese Journal of Phonetics, 2(1), 123–133.Google Scholar
(2010) Post-focus suppression: Now you see it, now you don’t. Journal of Phonetics, 38, 517–525. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2012) Tonal variation. In A. Cohn, C. Fourgeron, & M. Huffman (Eds.), Oxford handbook of laboratory phonology (pp. 103–114). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chen, Y., & Braun, B
(2006) Prosodic realization of information structure categories in Standard Chinese. In R. Hoffmann, & H. Mixdorff (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2006, Dresden: TUD Press.Google Scholar
Chen, Y., & Gussenhoven, C
(2008) Emphasis and tonal implementation in Standard Chinese. Journal of Phonetics, 36(4), 724–746. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cho, T
(2004) Prosodically conditioned strengthening and vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in English. Journal of Phonetics, 32(2), 141–176. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2006) Manifestation of prosodic structure in articulation: Evidence from lip kinematics in English. In L. Goldstein, D.H. Whalen, & C.T. Best (Eds.), Laboratory phonology VIII: Varieties of phonological competence (pp. 519–548). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Cho, T., & Keating, P
(2009) Effects of initial position versus prominence in English. Journal of Phonetics, 37(4), 466–485. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cinque, G
(1993) A null theory of phrase and compound stress. Linguistic Inquiry, 24(2), 239–297.Google Scholar
De Jong, K., Beckman, M.E., & Edwards, J
(1993) The interplay between prosodic structure and coarticulation. Language and Speech, 36(2–3), 197–212.Google Scholar
Duanmu, S
(1995) Metrical and tonal phonology of compounds in two Chinese dialects. Language, 71(2), 225–259. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2012) Word-length preferences in Chinese: A corpus study. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 21(1), 89–114. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Féry, C
(2010) Syntax, information structure, embedded prosodic phrasing, and the relational scaling of pitch accents. In N. Erteschik-Shir, & L. Rochman (Eds.), The sound patterns of syntax (pp. 271–290). Oxford: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Féry, C., & Samek-Lodovici, V
(2006) Focus projection and prosodic prominence in nested foci. Language, 82, 131–150. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fougeron, C., & Keating, P.A
(1997) Articulatory strengthening at edges of prosodic domains. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 101, 3728–3740. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gandour, J., Potisuk, S., & Dechongkit, S
(1994) Tonal coarticulation in Thai. Journal of Phonetics, 22(4), 477–492.Google Scholar
Gu, W., & Lee, T
(2007) Effects of tonal context and focus on Cantonese F0. In J. Trouvain, & W.J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 1033–1036). August 6-10, 2007, Saarbrücken, Germany.
Gussenhoven, C
(1992) Sentence accents and argument structure. In I.M. Roca (Ed.), Thematic structure: Its role in grammar (pp. 79–106). Berlin: Foris.Google Scholar
Ishihara, S
(2011) Japanese focus prosody revisited: Freeing focus from prosodic phrasing. Lingua, 121, 1870–1889. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jin, S
(1996) An acoustic study of sentence stress in Mandarin Chinese. Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, Columbus.Google Scholar
Jun, S.-A
(1998) The accentual phrase in the Korean prosodic hierarchy. Phonology, 15(2), 189–226. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kabagema-Bilan, E., López-Jiménez, B., & Truckenbrodt, H
(2011) Multiple focus in Mandarin Chinese. Lingua, 121, 1890–1905. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Li, Q., & Chen, Y
(2012) Trisyllabic tone sandhi in Tianjin Mandarin. Proceedings of Tonal Aspect of Languages (TAL) , Nanjing, China.
Pan, H.-H., & Tai, Y
(2006) Boundaries and tonal articulation in Taiwanese Min. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2006 , Dresden, Germany, 51–54.
Peng, S.-H
(1997) Production and perception of Taiwanese tones in different tonal and prosodic contexts. Journal of Phonetics, 25(3), 371–400. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Potisuk, S., Gandour, J., & Harper, M.P
(1997) Contextual variations in trisyllabic sequences of Thai tones. Phonetica, 54, 22–42. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Samek-Lodovici, V
(2005) Prosody-syntax interaction in the expression of focus. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 23(3), 687–755. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Selkirk, E
(2002) Contrastive FOCUS vs. presentational focus: Prosodic evidence from right node raising in English. In B. Bel, & I. Marlin (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2002 (pp. 643–646). Aix-en-Provence, France.Google Scholar
(2007) Contrastive focus, givenness and the unmarked status of “discourse-new”. Interdisciplinary studies on information structure (ISIS), 6, 125–145.Google Scholar
(2010) The Syntax-Phonology Interface. In J. Goldsmith, J. Riggle, & A. Yu (Eds.), The handbook of phonological theory (pp. 435–484). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
Truckenbrodt, H
(1999) On the relation between syntactic phrases and phonological phrases. Linguistic Inquiry, 30(2), 219–255. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Xu, Y
(1994) Production and perception of coarticulated tones. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America, 95(4), 2240–2253. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(1997) Contextual tonal variations in Mandarin. Journal of Phonetics, 25(1), 61–83. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(1999) Effects of tone and focus on the formation and alignment of f0 contours. Journal of Phonetics, 27(1), 55–105. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Yip, M
(1999) Feet, tonal reduction and speech rate at the word and phrase level in Chinese. In R. Kager & W. Zonneveld (Eds.), Phrasal phonology (pp. 171–194). Nijmegen: Nijmegen University Press.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

DiCanio, Christian, Joshua Benn & Rey Castillo García
2021. Disentangling the Effects of Position and Utterance-Level Declination on the Production of Complex Tones in Yoloxóchitl Mixtec. Language and Speech 64:3 ► pp. 515 ff. Crossref logo
Scholz, Franziska & Yiya Chen
2014. Sentence planning and f0 scaling in Wenzhou Chinese. Journal of Phonetics 47 ► pp. 81 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 may 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.