Prosodic disambiguation of wh-indeterminates in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

This study focuses on naturally occurring ambiguous utterances like “Zhōngguóduì shuí yě dǎ-bù-guò” in Mandarin to study if/how prosody is used for disambiguation of wh-indeterminates. The results of our production study suggest that wh-indeterminates are disambiguated prosodically. For the wh-region, interrogative readings are distinguished from indefinite readings by having a longer duration and higher maximum pitch. For the pre-wh region, longer duration was observed when the wh-word received interrogative readings and left-dislocated. For the post-wh region, significantly greater pitch excursion was observed for indefinite reading than for interrogative reading. In particular, the novel finding of post-wh pitch compression for wh-interrogatives in Mandarin is in line with what has been attested in other wh-in-situ languages, such as Japanese and Korean, which suggests shared prosodic mechanisms for disambiguating wh-indeterminates in wh-in-situ languages.