Standard Chinese phonology
Final /n/, /ŋ/ may be pronounced without complete oral closure, resulting in a syllable that in fact ends with a long nasalized vowel.
Some speakers realize them as palatalized dentals [t͡sʲ], [t͡sʰʲ], [sʲ]; this is claimed to be especially common among children and women,[1]: 33 although officially it is regarded as substandard and as a feature specific to the Beijing dialect.
[5] In phonological analysis, it is often assumed that, when not followed by one of the high front vowels [i] or [y], the alveolar-palatals consist of a consonant followed by a palatal glide ([j] or [ɥ]).
The alveolo-palatals arose historically from a merger of the dentals [t͡s, t͡sʰ, s] and velars [k, kʰ, x] before high front vowels and glides.
Examples are Peking for Beijing ([kiŋ] → [tɕiŋ]), Chungking for Chongqing ([kʰiŋ] → [tɕʰiŋ]), Fukien for Fujian (cf.
Hokkien), Tientsin for Tianjin ([tsin] → [tɕin]); Sinkiang for Xinjiang ([sinkiaŋ] → [ɕintɕiaŋ], and Sian for Xi'an ([si] → [ɕi]).
This may be realized as a consonant sound: [ʔ] and [ɣ] are possibilities, as are [ŋ] and [ɦ] in some non-standard varieties.
[1]: 28 (The same modifications of initial consonants occur in syllables where they are followed by a high vowel, although normally no glide is considered to be present there.
Syllabic nasal consonants are also heard in certain interjections; pronunciations of such words include [m], [n], [ŋ], [hm], [hŋ].
More details about the individual vowel allophones are given in the following table (not including the values that occur with the rhotic coda).
Some linguists prefer to reduce the number of vowel phonemes drastically (at the expense of including underlying glides in their systems).
[1]: 195 It occurs in two cases: The r final is pronounced with a relatively lax tongue, and has been described as a "retroflex vowel".
[1]: 41 In dialects that do not make use of the rhotic coda, it may be omitted in pronunciation, or in some cases a different word may be selected: for example, Beijing 这儿; 這兒; zhèr; 'here' and 那儿; 那兒; nàr; 'there' may be replaced by the synonyms 这里; 這裡; zhèlǐ and 那里; 那裡; nàlǐ.
However, in Standard Chinese, the average word length is actually almost exactly two syllables, practically eliminating most homophony issues even when tone is disregarded, especially when context is taken into account as well.
The contrast between full and weak syllables is distinctive; there are many minimal pairs such as 要事 yàoshì "important matter" and 钥匙 yàoshi "key", or 大意 dàyì "main idea" and (with the same characters) dàyi "careless", the second word in each case having a weak second syllable.
The tone marks and numbers are rarely used outside of language textbooks: in particular, they are usually absent in public signs, company logos, and so forth.
Gwoyeu Romatzyh is a rare example of a system where tones are represented using normal letters of the alphabet (although without a one-to-one correspondence).
When a third-tone syllable is not said in isolation, this rise is normally heard only if it appears at the end of a sentence or before a pause, and then usually only on stressed monosyllables.
The overall pitch contour of the third tone is traditionally described as ˨˩˦ 214, but for modern Standard Chinese speakers, the rise, if present, is not that high.
In Beijing, its value inclines to ˨˩˧ 213 or ˨˩˨ 212, while in Taiwan it is usually ˧˩˨ 312 (Taiwanese Standard Chinese speakers also tend to never pronounce the rising part in any context).
It features a sharp fall from high to lower pitch (as is heard in curt commands in English, such as "Stop!").
In Standard Chinese, about 15–20% of the syllables in written texts are considered unstressed, including certain suffixes, clitics, and particles.
However, the "spreading" theory incompletely characterizes the neutral tone, especially in sequences where more than one neutral-tone syllable is found adjacent.
Some such changes have been noted above in the descriptions of the individual tones; however, the most prominent phenomena of this kind relate to consecutive sequences of third-tone syllables.
In perceptual experiments, native Beijing Mandarin speakers could easily recognize the intended tone in the original word, but could not recognize it when it was stripped from the context by the adjacent syllables being replaced with white noise:[44] Besides the speech rate, the frequency of expression may also play a role in triggering this tone change.
Others, however, reject this analysis, noting that the apparent final-syllable stress can be ascribed purely to natural lengthening of the final syllable of a phrase, and disappears when a word is pronounced within a sentence rather than in isolation.
There is a strong tendency for Chinese prose to employ four-syllable 'prosodic words' consisting of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables which are further subdivided into two trochaic feet.
[45] Statistical analysis of chengyu and other idiomatic phrases in vernacular texts indicates that the four-syllable prosodic word had become an important metrical consideration by the Wei and Jin dynasties (4th century CE).
Chinese makes frequent use of particles to express certain meanings such as doubt, query, command, etc., reducing the need to use intonation.
However, intonation is still present in Chinese (expressing meanings rather similarly as in standard English), although there are varying analyses of how it interacts with the lexical tones.
