The prosody of Mandarin Chinese. By Xiao-Nan Susan Shen. (University of California Publications in Linguistics, 118.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Pp. vii, 95. Paper $15.00.

Abstract

Through acoustic analysis of Mandarin Chinese intonation, the author finds that the intonation baseline moves up when intonation is shifted from assertive to interrogative; therefore, two baselines and two intonation layers must be reckoned with. Sentence intonation affects the tonal values and the tonal shapes of intrinsic lexical tones, though not beyond recognition. Tonal changes prove to be closely related to sentence intonation, which is superimposed simultaneously onto the utterance as a whole. The author's findings support the position of the movability of the intonation baseline and rectify some widely spread traditional claims concerning Mandarin Chinese prosody.

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