Abstract
The investigation of Mandarin prosody has been focusing on the suprasegmental characteristics of lexical tones in previous studies, the understanding of Mandarin sentence prosody, on the other hand, is still limited. To bridge this gap, this study probed the prosodic features of Mandarin tag questions in comparison with those from the declarative counterparts. The aim was to verify the hypothesis that the statement parts in the tag questions would be prosodically comparable with the declarative counterparts, whereas the tag “dui bu dui?” (analogous to English question tags e.g. “is it, doesn’t it?”), being an interrogative marker, would show focal characteristics. 20 adult Mandarin speakers recorded 12 Mandarin sentences (6 tag questions + 6 declarative counterparts); the pitch fluctuation scale, duration ratio, and intensity ratio of which were extracted using Mini Speech Lab (Zhu & Shi, 2020) to compare the focal differences between the two types of Mandarin sentences. The statement parts in the tag questions exhibited focal characteristics similar to Mandarin general questions, while the tag “dui bu dui?” showed the characteristics of post-focal compression. These findings were at odds with our hypothesis. Results of the current study suggested that the focal positions of Mandarin questions might not be consistently associated with the interrogative markers as previous study would suggest, but are contingent upon the syntax-semantics of the corresponding utterances.
This research was supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China for post funded projects (20FYYB042) and Humanities and Social Science Project of Ministry of Education of China (22YJC740093).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Chen, Y.: Durational adjustment under corrective focus in standard Chinese. J. Phon. 34, 176–201 (2006)
Chen, Y., Gussenhoven, C.: Emphasis and tonal implementation in standard Chinese. J. Phon. 36(4), 724–746 (2008)
Chen, Y., Xu, Y., Guion-Anderson, S.: Prosodic realization of focus in bilingual production of southern min and mandarin. Phonetica 71, 249–270 (2014)
Cooper, W.E., Eady, S.J., Mueller, P.R.: Acoustical aspects of contrastive stress in question-answer contexts. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 77, 2142–2156 (1985)
Cutler, A., Isard, S.D.: The production of prosody. In: Language Production, vol. 1, pp. 245–269. Academic Press, London (1980)
Hsu, Y.Y., Xu, A.: Interaction of prosody and syntax-semantics in Mandarin wh -indeterminates. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 148(2), EL119–EL124 (2020)
Kochanski, G.P., Shih, C.: Prosody modeling with soft template. Speech Commun. 39, 311–352 (2003)
Kuang, J., Kuo, G.: Comparison of prosodic properties of intonation in Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 129(4), 2680 (2011)
Liang, L., Shi, F.: Acoustic studies on lexical stress of bi-syllabic words in standard Chinese. In: Phonetic Conference of China PCC 2008, Beijing (2008)
Lin, Y., Ding, H., Zhang, Y.: Prosody dominates over semantics in emotion word processing: evidence from cross-channel and cross-modal stroop effects. J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 63(3), 896–912 (2020)
Liu, F., Surendran, D., Xu, Y.: Classification of statement and question intonations in Mandarin. In: Speech Prosody Dresden, 2–5 May 2006
Liu, F., Xu, Y.: Parallel encoding of focus and interrogative meaning in Mandarin intonation. Phonetica 62, 70–87 (2005)
Mini Speech Lab 2.0 [computer program] Homepage. https://www.freeber.cn/Index/show/catid/49/id/207.html. Accessed 6 2020
Praat: Doing phonetics by computer (version 6.0.49) Homepage [computer program]. http://www.praat.org/. Accessed 2 Mar 2019
Shao, J.: Study of Interrogative Sentences in Modern Chinese. East China Normal University Press, Shanghai (1985)
Shen, J.: Pitch range of tone and intonation in Beijing dialect. In: Lin, T., Wang, L. (eds.) Working Papers in Experimental Phonetics, pp. 73–130. Peking University Press, Beijing (1985)
Shen, X.: The Prosody of Mandarin Chinese. University of California Press, Berkeley (1989)
Shi, F., Wang, P.: Boundary tone and focus tone. J. Chin. Linguist. 42(1), 93–108 (2014)
Wang, B., Xu, Y., Ding, Q.: Interactive prosodic marking of focus, boundary and newness in Mandarin. Phonetica 75(1), 24–56 (2018)
Xu, Y.: Effects of tone and focus on the formation and alignment of F0 contours. J. Phon. 27, 55–105 (1999)
Xu, Y., Chen, S., Wang, B.: Prosodic focus with and without post-focus compression: A typological divide within the same language family? Linguist. Rev. 29(1), 131–147 (2012)
Yan, Y.: Study of Tag Questions in Modern Chinese. Shanghai People’s Publishing House, Shanghai (2017)
Yan, J., Wang, P., Shi, F.: Acoustic analysis on mark multiplexing in interrogative sentences: for the positive and negative interrogative sentences. Lang. Teach. Linguist. Stud. 5, 97–102 (2014)
Yan, J., Wang, P., Shi, F.: An acoustic analysis of specific interrogation of Mandarin. J. Sino-Tibetan Linguist. 9, 121–129 (2016)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this paper
Cite this paper
Yan, J., Yang, Y., Chen, F. (2023). Interplay Between Prosody and Syntax-Semantics: Evidence from the Prosodic Features of Mandarin Tag Questions. In: Zhenhua, L., Jianqing, G., Kai, Y., Jia, J. (eds) Man-Machine Speech Communication. NCMMSC 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1765. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2401-1_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2401-1_17
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-99-2400-4
Online ISBN: 978-981-99-2401-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)