Abstract
This study aims to compare tone-3 sandhi among Beijing, northeast, and broadcast Mandarin through a productive experiment to examine if there is pitch difference between sandhied tone 3 and lexical tone 2. The results show that the pitch difference in F0 between sandhied tone 3 and lexical tone 2 is larger in broadcast Mandarin than that in Beijing Mandarin but the pertinent difference in Beijing Mandarin is larger than that in northeast Mandarin. The results indicate that tone-3 sandhi among variants of Mandarin displays a continuum of a categorical change and tonal reduction. Gender effects in F0 difference are also observed. The difference in female samples is consistently larger than that of male samples across the three Mandarin variants.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 64-75 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | LACUS FORUM Journal of the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States |
| Volume | 46 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| Publication status | Published - 2022 |
Keywords
- Tone sandhi, Beijing, northeast, broadcast Mandarin, fundamental frequency (F0)