Declination in Toishan

Abstract

Many have noted a tendency for fundamental frequency to gradually lower during the production of an utterance. This downtrend has sometimes been attributed to declination, a phonologically unmotivated lowering of F0 that is independent of tone. Recently, Johnson [Meeting Handbook, LSA, 21 (1985)] discovered data consistent with the view that declination exists in Cantonese. Like Cantonese, Toishan (another Yue dialect) exhibits little, if any tone sandhi. To see whether Toishan likewise exhibits declination, we had native speakers produce sentences containing high level tones, with varying amounts of material between the target high tones. The sentences are organized into passages so that, in addition to an examination of declination at the sentence level, an examination can be made at the discourse level as well (since it is possible that the degree of declination within a sentence depends on the position of the sentence within the discourse unit).