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.
Ling Zhang (Thu,) studied this question.