Phonological influences on the realization of final lowering evidence from dialogue Chinese Mandarin

Abstract

Despite the discovery of final lowering effect in widespread language, its origin and realization in different phonological environments still needs exploration. In this article, with a large dialogue corpus, three experiments are conducted to examine how phonological factors (such as prosodic units, sentence stresses and boundary pitch movement) would influence the realization of final lowering in Chinese Mandarin. The results show that: I) The bearing unit of final lowering in Chinese is the last prosodic word in the utterance, regardless of its length, rather than a fixed duration range in a physiological way. II) The position of the sentence stress has an influence on the presence/absence of final lowering. To be specific, final lowering tends to be triggered by sentence stresses on the penultimate and last third prosodic word, and suppressed by sentences stresses prior to the last third prosodic word. III) Final lowering effect would be pushed leftward by sentence stresses and high boundary tones in final positions. This article lends support to the phonological origin of final lowering, and introduces a cross-linguistic framework of prosodic structure to analyze its specific realization under different conditions of stress positions and boundary pitch movements.