2007/09/12

Ho, A. T. (1976). Mandarin tones in relation to sentence intonation and grammatical structure. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 4(1), 1-13.

Presentation: Sarah
Summary: Chris

This paper aims to investigate how sentence intonation and grammatical structure have influence on the realization of the four tones in Mandarin. Subjects were asked to read target words embedded in six sentence conditions. Results showed that although the four tones preserve basic contour shapes, sentence intonation and grammatical function have influence on tone contour. The variations of tone contours are very closely related to the grammatical structure of the sentence in which they appear, which proves that grammatical information is needed to provide low level phonetic rules for the realization of tone contours. Speakers rely on syntactic or categorical information to produce speech in appropriate intonation. This finding is also compatible with Chao’s theory in which a metaphor ‘small ripples on large waves’ is utilized. Many complicated ripples and waves join together in different ways according to the grammatical structure of a sentence.