Prosodic Prominence and Phrasing in Spoken Mandarin: The Case in the 3 tone

Prosodic prominence and phrasing has some general principle commonly existed in the world languages, but their execution is language-specific, especially in tone languages like Chinese. The kernel of the issue is that how the pitch manifestation of individual tones accommodate to achieve prominence and phrasing within certain prosodic domain. This paper tries to explore the peculiarity on pitch alignment of the 3 tone in Mandarin Chinese by examining its F0 movements in different accent status. The primary result leads to a consideration that, the pattern of pitch manifestation for prominence and phrasing may greatly depend on the register distinction among the tones, even without regard to other context environments.