Intonation (linguistics) - Intonation in Mandarin Chinese

Intonation in Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language, meaning that pitch contours within a word distinguish the word from other words with the same vowels and consonants. Nevertheless, Mandarin also has intonation patterns—patterns of pitch throughout the phrase or sentence—that indicate the nature of the sentence as a whole.

There are four basic sentence types having distinctive intonation: declarative sentences, unmarked interrogative questions, yes-no questions marked as such with the sentence-final particle ma, and A-not-A questions of the form "He go not go" (meaning "Does he go or not?"). In the prestigious Beijing dialect these are intonationally distinguished for the average speaker as follows, using a pitch scale from 1 (lowest) to 9 (highest):

• Declarative sentences go from pitch level 3 to 5 and then down to 2 and 1.
• A-not-A questions go from 6 to 9 to 2 to 1.
• Yes-no ma questions go from 6 to 9 to 4 to 5.
• Unmarked questions go from 6 to 9 to 4 to 6.

Thus questions are begun with a higher pitch than are declarative sentences; pitch rises and then falls in all sentences; and in yes-no questions and unmarked questions pitch rises at the end of the sentence, while for declarative sentences and A-not-A questions the sentence ends at very low pitch.

Because Mandarin distinguishes words on the basis of within-syllable tones, these tones create fluctuations of pitch around the sentence patterns indicated above. Thus the sentence patterns can be thought of as bands whose pitch varies over the course of the sentence, while changes of syllable pitch cause fluctuations within the band.

Furthermore, the details of Mandarin intonation are affected by various factors, including the tone of the final syllable, the presence or absence of focus (centering of attention) on the final word, and the dialect of the speaker.