Tone and intonation in Cantonese

Abstract

The phenomenon known as an F0 downtrend has recently been attributed to local phonological rules (such as downstep and final lowering) in English. A preliminary study of Cantonese seemed to indicate that a back-drop F0 decline is an important aspect of the Cantonese intonational system. In that study it was found that the preservation of lexical tones in Cantonese sentences could best be accounted for when declination was included in the description. In the study to be reported in this paper the method used in the preliminary investigation is refined and two tests of a possible declination effect are employed. The refinements include: (1) recording sentences in utterance medial position, and (2) using pragmatically neutral sentences (i.e., the target sentences neither introduce nor conclude a discourse topic). The first test for declination is the tone preservaton criterion used in the preliminary study. The second has to do with the presence or absence of a correlation between the ratio of F0 measurements of early and late occurrences of a tone and the number of syllables intervening between the two occurrences. Such a correlation between F0 ratio and number of intervening syllables would indicate a declination effect (if the slope is negative). If no evidence for declination is found then the approach which attributes downtrend to local phonological rules is supported. If evidence for declination is found then declination must be included among the possible methods of accounting for downtrend.