A Corpus-based Analysis of Prosodic Pauses in bă, gěi and ràng Constructions in Taiwan Mandarin

A Corpus-based Analysis of Prosodic Pauses in bă, gěi and ràng Constructions in Taiwan Mandarin Chihkai Lin Tatung University / No. 40, Section 3 Zhongshan North Road, Taipei City, Taiwan (R.O.C) linchihkai@gmail.com Abstract This paper investigates prosodic pauses in bă, gěi, and ràng constructions in Taiwan Mandarin and adopts a corpus-based approach by collecting spoken data from an online corpus, NCCU Corpus of Spoken Taiwan Mandarin. The results show that prosodic pauses are not preferred before and after the bă, gěi, and ràng words in the three constructions. However, whenever there is a pause, the left edge of the bă, gěi, and ràng words is preferable to the right edge. 1 Introduction This paper investigates prosodic pauses in bă, gěi, and ràng constructions in Taiwan Mandarin from a corpus-based approach. Prosodic pauses have been recognized as a significant indicator to mark the syntactic boundaries, provide time for speech planning, indicate semantic focus and show a cue of turn-taking. According to Zellner (1994), there are two major types of pauses in speech: linguistic pause and psychological pause. The linguistic pause which is based on production is interpreted as a physical phenomenon when no acoustic signal is observed in spectrum. The linguistic pause is divided into intra-segmental pauses and inter- lexical pauses, showing a positional difference between pauses within a phonological word and pauses across phonological words. On the other hand, the psychological pause is based on perception, and there are also two types of pauses: silent pauses and filled pauses. The two types are distinguished by fillers. Silent pauses lack fillers, while filled pauses contain pauses introduced by fillers, such as ah and um in English. Prosodic pauses function as an indicator to mark boundaries and determine prosodic hierarchy. According to Tseng, Chang, and Su (2005), Tseng (2006, 2008), and Tseng and Chang (2008), the prosodic hierarchy of Mandarin Chinese is shown in (1).1 (1) Utterance (U) | Prosodic group (PG) | Breath group (BG) | Prosodic phrase (PP) | Prosodic word (PW) | Syllable (S) In this hierarchy, there are five levels of breaks between the boundary of syllables (B1), prosodic words (B2), prosodic phrases (B3), breath groups (B4), and prosodic groups (B5). Tsai (2005) and 1 Breath group in (1) is not always necessary because it is related to how long a speaker can talk within breaths. When the meaning is fully expressed, breath group is merged into the higher prosodic group (Tseng 2008: 662). Chen (2015) suggest that the boundary between prosodic phrases (B3) is more prominent than the one between prosodic words (B2). That is to say, the phrasal boundary plays a more crucial role than the word boundary. Example is shown in (2). (2) PG / \ PP PP / \ / \ PW PW PW PW | /\ | /\ S S S S S S | | | | | | wŏ jīntiān qù xuéxiào I today go school ‘I go to school today.’ Theoretically speaking, pauses can occur between boundaries at any level, …

Content truncated to 500 words