The Prosody of Mandarin Chinese

Download or read book The Prosody of Mandarin Chinese written by Xiao-nan Susan Shen and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through acoustic analysis of Mandarin Chinese intonation, the author finds that the intonation baseline moves up when intonation is shifted from assertive to interrogative; therefore, two baselines and two intonation layers must be reckoned with. Sentence intonation affects the tonal values and the tonal shapes of intrinsic lexical tones, though not beyond recognition. Tonal changes prove to be closely related to sentence intonation, which is superimposed simultaneously onto the utterance as a whole. The author's findings support the position of the movability of the intonation baseline and rectify some widely spread traditional claims concerning Mandarin Chinese prosody.