The Effect Of Emphatic Focus On Mandarin Tone Sandhi

This thesis systematically investigates the interaction of emphatic focus(EF)and Mandarin third tone sandhi through an empirically comparative study between normal focus(NF)and emphatic focus(EF),by means of phonetic software Praat.We control the experiment sample from four factors concerning syntactic structures,syllable numbers,focus types,and tonal sequences.Syntactically,we choose[VVNP]as the only syntactic juncture in this thesis However,more discussion about the influence of syntactic structures on tone sandhi(TS)is not included here.The syllable number of the experiment sample is four.There are two types of focus:NF and EF.We have four tonal sequences including 3331,3332,3333,and 3334.The numerals 1 to 4 represent four lexical tones,not including a neutral tone."1" stands for the high-level tone(tone 1);"2" stands for the rising tone(tone 2);"3" stands for the low-falling-(rising)tone(tone 3);"4" stands for the falling tone(tone 4).For tonal sequences 3331,3332,and 3334,the first three tones within each sequence are tone 3 except the last tone.For the tonal sequence 3333,all tones in the sequence are tone 3.Because of this,we classify the tonal sequences into two categories:Category A refers to the sequences including 3331,3332,and 3334.Category B refers to the only sequence 3333.Through the analysis of surface forms of the tonal sequences with different syllables emphasized,as well as the durational characteristic of the stressed syllables,we try to explore the effect of emphatic focus on Mandarin tone sandhi and the way it works.The experiment results suggest that:(1)The emphatic focus does exert the blocking effect on the application of Mandarin tone sandhi.The effect of emphatic focus on tone sandhi may be realized not through maintaining its underlying tone but through changing the sandhi domain.(2)It supports the claim that the emphasized syllable may not always carry the underlying tone as the surface tone:it either bears the underlying tone or the sandhi tone.(3)The emphatic focus does have a significant effect on the duration of the phrase,compared with the normal focus.Notably,there is no duration difference for the final two syllables.The emphasized syllable tends to be lengthened.