Are Mandarin Sandhi Tone 3 and Tone 2 the Same or Different? The Results of Functional Data Analysis

Are Mandarin Sandhi Tone 3 and Tone 2 the Same or Different? The Results of Functional Data Analysis Chierh Cheng1 Jenn-Yeu Chen1 Michele Gubian2 1Department of Chinese as a Second Language, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan 2Center for Language and Speech Technology, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands chierh.cheng@gmail.com, psyjyc@ntnu.edu.tw, M.Gubian@let.ru.nl Abstract Functional Data Analysis (FDA) is used to investigate Tone 3 sandhi in Taiwan Mandarin. Tone 3 sandhi is a tone change phenomenon that arises when two low tones occur in succession resulting in the first tone being realised as a rising tone. Tone dyads T2T3 and T3T3 were compared in terms of their F0 contours and velocity profiles. No difference was found between the F0 contours of the two tone dyads. In contrast, velocity profiles showed an increased difference in the later part of the seemingly similar rising movements of T2 and sandhi T3, with a steeper rising-falling movement in the former than the latter. This research demonstrates that FDA can elucidate more detail in the time dimension than that of conventional techniques commonly employed in the current phonetic literature. 1 Introduction This paper aims to take a closer look at tone sandhi, and in particular Tone 3 sandhi, a traditional research question in Chinese linguistics. Tone sandhi occurs whenever a prosodic context is met for disyllabic units of certain tonal combinations; the tone of the first syllable is changed from its underlying tone in a systematic manner. Tone 3 sandhi and yi sandhi are the two major tone sandhi phenomena in Mandarin1. Tone 3 sandhi means that a low tone is realised as a rising one when followed by another low tone. For example, zong3 tong3 (‘ 總 統 ’, means ‘president’) is realised as 1 Tone 1 (high-level, H), Tone 2 (rising, R), Tone 3 (low, L) and Tone 4 (falling, F) are the four main tone categories in Mandarin. There is also a neutral tone, Tone 5, which is more frequently used in mainland China than in Taiwan. zong2 tong3. Tone 3 sandhi is also seen to be cyclically applied according to a hierarchical prosodic structure (Shih, 1997). The scope of yi sandhi, on the other hand, is somewhat limited. yi here means the number ‘one’ in Mandarin and its underlying high-level tone (Tone 1) undergoes respective changes according to its following morpheme being a classifier of a specific tone.2 That is to say, yi sandhi requires matching phonological and morphological contexts. Myers and Tsay (2003) supplemented their study on tone sandhi in general with yi sandhi and concluded that more empirical data is needed to elucidate the most ubiquitous but still unclear nature of Tone 3 sandhi in Chinese phonology. Xu (2004, p. 796) similarly speculated the following on the mechanism of Tone 3 sandhi, “It is unclear whether the largely rising contour in the first L of L L is due to a complete change of the target to [rise] as in R or due to implementation of the same complex target as in isolated …

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