Prosodic licensing and Mandarin tone 2 sandhi - Interaction between tone and stress

This work explores the interaction between tone and stress in contour tone languages. Mandarin tone 2 (hence after T2) sandhi is focused as this sandhi process is uniformly agreed as being induced by stress. In order to disambiguate the basic facts of this process, an experiment was designed and conducted. Based on the analysis of the results, a prosodic licensing account of T2 sandhi is provided and two types of relations between tone and stress in Mandarin are attested. Statically, there is a relation between high register and prominence, between low register and non-prominence; between rising contour and prominence and between level tone and non-prominence. Dynamically, stress governs the realization of tone