Prosodic strength intrinsic to lexical items: A corpus study on tone reduction in Tone4+Tone4 words in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

This study explored word-level prosodic strength in Mandarin Chinese reflected by tone reduction on the second syllables in Tone4+Tone4 words, by examining the slope difference between the two consecutive tones as an indicator for tonal reduction. It was found that firstly, the occurrence of tonal reduction is dependent on the internal structure of the word: words formed by apposition, (pseudo-)suffixation and replication were more vulnerable to tonal reduction than verb-object words and loanwords were. Secondly, with regards to language proficiency, higher proficiency speakers do larger amount of reduction than lower proficiency speakers do. Thirdly, the prosodic position has an asymmetrical influence on tone realization for words susceptible or unsusceptible to tone reduction: words susceptible to reduction shows heavier reduction in utterance-final positions than in non-final positions, while words not susceptible to tonal reduction do not show heavier reduction in utterance-final positions, and even show slight strengthening on the second tone in some cases. It is argued that tone reduction in T4+T4 words reflected the existence of fine-grained degrees of prosodic strength intrinsic to lexical items.