Rhythmic Organization of Mandarin Utterances - A Two-Stage Process

This paper investigates the rhythmic organization of Mandarin utterances through both corpus analyses and experimental studies. We propose to add a new prosodic unit, the principle prosodic unit (PPU), into the prosodic hierarchy of Mandarin utterances. The key characteristic of PPU is that innerunit words normally have to be spoken closely, while inter-unit grouping is rather flexible. Because of this, we further suggest that the rhythmic organization of Mandarin utterances is a two-stage process. In the first stage, syllables are grouped into prosodic words, and then to PPUs. The forming of PPUs is restricted by the local syntactic constraint and the length constraint. In the second stage, though the rhythmic constraint still has influences, the grouping of PPUs into phrases is rather flexible. Normally, multiple equally good solutions exist for a sentence in this stage.