La modification tonale du 3ème ton du mandarin parlé à Taiwan

Abstract

In this study, we investigate the 3rd tone sandhi realizations of Taiwanese Mandarin in different sentence position, i.e. initial, middle and final position. The acoustic comparison of 14 pairs of homonymes shows that the 2nd tone and the half 3rd tone are realized identically from a statistic point of view. But we also observe the interesting fact that the 2nd tone tends to have a higher pitch value, and that the half 3rd tone tends to have a longer duration. In other words, these two tones are the same phonetically, but still reflect their different underlying forms.