Effects of Syntactic Structures on Intonational Pitch Movement in Mandarin Chinese

Bibliographic Data

ID19487447
AuthorsLing Zhang (0000-0003-0442-8701, Education University of Hong Kong, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume11
Issue6
Pages119
Publication date2026-06-11
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguages (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2226-471X • E-ISSN: 2226-471X
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/languages11060119
OpenAlexW7164367391
LanguageEN
References cited9

Previous research on Mandarin Chinese tones and intonation has focused primarily on universal sentence pitch patterns (declination) and sentence types (declarative and interrogative). The specific impact of internal syntactic structures remains under-explored. This study presents two acoustic experiments using controlled Tone 1 (high-level) stimuli to isolate intonational “big waves” from lexical “small ripples”. Experiment 1 investigates how syntactic position (subject vs. object), relative clause type (subject-relative vs. object-relative), and word class (verb vs. noun) influence pitch contours. Experiment 2 resolves conflicting findings regarding word-class pitch by testing nouns and verbs across four sentential contexts. The results indicate that subject positions carry significantly higher pitch than object positions, reflecting an interaction between SVO word order and declination. Crucially, subject-relative (SR) clauses exhibit a falling pitch tendency, while object-relative (OR) clauses show a rising trend. These results suggest that pitch realization is a complex “algebraic sum” of universal phonological trends, syntactic hierarchy, and semantic information structure

Intonation (linguistics) · Mandarin Chinese · Noun · Pitch accent · Realization (probability) · Sentence · Tone (literature) · Word (group theory) · Word order · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Neuroscience and Music Perception · Phonetics and Phonology Research

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