Analysis of Shanghainese F0 contours based on the command-response model

As one of the major Chinese dialects, Shanghainese is well known for its complex tone sandhi system. This paper applies the command-response model to represent F0 contours of Shanghainese speech. Analysis-by-Synthesis is conducted both on carrier sentences with monosyllabic target words and on isolated polysyllabic words, from which a set of appropriate tone command patterns is derived for words of different lengths and different initial citation tones. By incorporating the effects of tone coarticulation, word accentuation and phrase intonation, the model gives high accuracy of approximations to F0 contours of Shanghainese utterances, and hence provides a more efficient means to quantitatively represent F0 contours and to describe the tone sandhi system of Shanghainese than the traditional 5-level tone code system.