Prosodically conditioned neutral-tone realization in Tianjin Mandarin

Abstract

While prosodic boundaries are known to affect the acoustic realization of segments and lexical full tones, no study thus far has examined how the f0 realization of a neutral tone is influenced by different prosodic boundaries. This study set out to fill this knowledge gap by investigating the effect of prosodic boundary on neutral-tone realization in Tianjin Mandarin, a variety which has been reported to exhibit interesting context-dependent f0 variation. Our results showed that the high neutral-tone f0 offset before the low falling tone (Tone 1) does not need to be treated as a special tonal target as claimed in the literature, but rather could be due to the raising effect brought about by the following T1, which can also be observed on the f0 realization of lexical tones. The neutral tone in Tianjin Mandarin has a mid-low tonal target similar to that in Standard Chinese. In addition, by manipulating the prosodic boundary between neutral tone and the following T1, we observed an interesting effect of prosodic boundary on the neutral-tone f0 realization. Specifically, the raising effect due to the following T1 can be blocked by a higher-level prosodic boundary (i.e., a Subject-Predicate boundary) compared to a lower-level prosodic boundary (i.e., a Below-NP boundary). Finally, our study observed both effects of prosodic boundary and focus on tonal implementation. They remain separate mechanisms in speech production, but could interact to modulate the magnitude of f0 changes due to effects of focus and prosodic boundary in neutral-tone f0 realization.