Tianjinese Lexical Tone, Tone Sandhi, and Prosody: Amplitude-f0 Dependency under Prominence in Mandarin

In Tianjin Mandarin, f0 and amplitude track together on low (L) tone T1, low rising (LH) tone T3, and high falling (HL) tone T4, as is claimed to be true generally of Standard Mandarin (see Yip 2002). In contrast, lexical high tone T2 f0 tracks least systematically with amplitude, whereas tonesandhi derived high tones on T3 and T2 co-vary with amplitude most consistently. The tone sandhi induced insertion of T2 high f0/db pitch accent between adjacent low tones co-occurs with phrase level prominence on the disyllabic word or phrase in which it appears. These facts are consistent with other evidence in Tianjinese of H pitch accent surfacing before L tones: f0 on neutral tone 0 before L Tone 1 and LH Tone 3 syllables is high, on hypothesis in the same phrasal environments, and f0/amplitude excursions on T3 before L T1 often are as well. These data support the author’s hypothesis (Davison in press) that a high f0/db pitch accent marks intonational phrase, contrary to the prevailing assumption that lexical tone languages such as Chinese do not permit phrasal pitch accents internal to intonational phrases.