GHAPTER 1 Introduction 1
1.1 Background of prosodic study of natural languages 1
1.1.1 Function of prosody 5
1.1.2 Form of prosody 9
1.2 Mandarin prosody:issues and previous approaches 19
1.2.1 Introduction of Mandarin 19
1.2.2 Earlier studies on the interaction between tone and intonation 21
1.2.3 Previous studies on rhythmic accent 26
1.2.4 Recent studies:from data to modelling 31
1.3 Objective of the present study 44
1.3.1 The data of the study 44
1.3.2 Aplausible mapping between form and function 45
CHAPTER 2 Literature Review of Prosodic Study 53
2.1 Introduction 53
2.2 The British School 53
2.3 The Dutch School 57
2.4 The American School 60
2.4.1 The level approach 60
2.4.2 The Autosegmental-metrical approach 61
2.4.3 The ToBI labeling system 65
2.4.4 Pan-Mandarin system 68
2.5 Summary 70
CHAPTER 3 Speech Corpora and Labeling Methodology 73
3.1 Introduction 73
3.1.1 Daily-conversation corpus 73
3.1.2 Read-speech corpus 74
3.2 Data selection and labeling 75
3.3 Summary 81
CHAPTER 4 Three Functional Components of Mandarin Prosody 83
4.1 Introduction 83
4.2 Lexical tone 83
4.2.1 The functional role of lexical tone 83
4.2.2 The paradigmatic annotation of lexical tone 84
4.2.3 The autosegmental property of tone 86
4.2.4 The phonological representation of tone:level vs.contour systems 100
4.2.5 Tone sandhi in context 104
4.3 Rhythmic accent 123
4.3.1 Accentual hierarchy 123
4.3.2 The prosodic structure of Mandarin speech 138
4.3.3 Prosodic grouping and tone-sandhi domain 142
4.4 Intonation 155
4.4.1 The melodic events of Mandarin speech prosody 155
4.5 Summary 175
CHAPTER 5 Analysis by Synthesis of Mandarin Prosody 177
5.1 Introduction 177
5.2 Evaluating the predicted data with Prozed 179
5.3 Discussion 185
5.4 Summary 191
CHAPTER 6 Conclusion 193
Bibliography 197