Sentence prosody and wh-indeterminates in Taiwan Mandarin

Abstract

We report results of a speech production experiment about the intonation of three sentence types in Taiwan Mandarin, and discuss our results with implications for focus acoustics, and semantic-syntactic theories of sentence final particles and wh-indeterminates. Wh-indeterminates refer to wh-phrases that are ambiguous between interrogative and indefinite readings. In Mandarin, different interpretations of wh-indeterminates are not morphologically marked, but can be disambiguated in specific sentence contexts marked by sentence final particles. In this study, we systematically examined the intonation of wh-questions and yes/no questions by using declarative sentences as the baseline. The results show that both wh- and yes/no questions exhibit F0 prominence, and lengthening effects on regions containing sentence-final particles and wh-phrases, but the effects were stronger in wh-questions. Examining the duration and F0 range, we found that wh-phrases and sentence final particles together formed specific acoustic patterns to distinguish questions from declarative sentences. The findings suggest that the prosodic organization interacts with other internal structural organization.