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oa Testing the applicability of third tone sandhi at the intonation boundary
The case of the monosyllabic topic
- Source: Language and Linguistics, Volume 21, Issue 4, Sept 2020, p. 639 - 654
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- 01 Apr 2018
- 10 Sept 2018
- 18 Sept 2020
Abstract
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.