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Article published In: Language and Linguistics
Vol. 21:4 (2020) ► pp.639–654

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Testing the applicability of third tone sandhi at the intonation boundary

The case of the monosyllabic topic

 | National Chin-Yi University of Technology
 | National Cheng Kung University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 18 October 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00073.liu
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to test the applicability of Tone Three Sandhi (T3S) when the critical syllable is a monosyllabic topic preceding a topic boundary. A recitation task from 37 native speakers of Taiwan Mandarin was employed. The results from human judgements indicated that the participants predominantly produced the critical syllables with Tone 3 (T3). Additionally, the fundamental frequency of the critical syllables demonstrated a falling contour, showing that T3S was not applied. Intonation break-ups and the prolongation of the critical syllables lent strong support to the view that the topic syllable was at an intonation/phonological phrase-final position. The findings can be elegantly accommodated by constraint-based analyses, which propose that T3S must be avoided when two T3 syllables are separated by an intonation/phonological phrase boundary. Issues relating to pauses, speech rates and word frequency effects are also discussed.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Design
    • 2.3Procedure for data collection
    • 2.4Equipment and software
    • 2.5Human tone judgements
    • 2.6Acoustic analyses
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Inter-coder reliability
    • 3.2Tone preferences for critical syllables
    • 3.3F0 contour
    • 3.4Duration measurements
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Theoretical consequences of T3S analyses
    • 4.2Pauses, speech rates and T3S application
    • 4.3Word frequency effects on T3SA
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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