A preliminary investigation of the third tone sandhi in standard Chinese with a prosodic corpus

Abstract

In standard Chinese, a low tone (Tone 3) is usually changed into a rising tone (Tone 2) when it is immediately followed by another third tone, which is known as the third tone sandhi. The 3rd tone sandhi has been widely discussed in Chinese phonology. This paper, however, employs a prosodic corpus we are developing to study the acoustic realization of the sandhi rising tones. We find that the magnitude of rising is larger within the disyllabic word boundary than across the boundary. Moreover the tone sandhi is closely related with the prominence of the 3rd tone sandhi syllable, the sandhi tone tends to rise if it is stressed, which implies it is prominence rather than reduction that is one of the main factors for the formation of the 3rd tone sandhi.