普通话的轻声其实是独立的词汇声调，非无调或弱化音。
Phonetic and semantic analyses of spoken corpora of Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin indicate that the neutral tone is a lexical tone
- 通过语料库分析发现轻声有自身音高目标，与四声类似。
- 双音节词中轻声的音高受前字声调影响，且每词有特定音高特征。
- 轻声特征可由上下文嵌入向量部分预测，适合语音研究者参考。
普通话的轻声具有神秘属性，常被描述为弱化或无调音。在双音节词中仅出现在第二音节，单音节词也可带轻声。本研究基于北京和台湾普通话口语语料库，分析轻声的语音实现。结果表明：轻声具有自身音高目标，如同普通话四声；双音节词中轻声的音高轮廓受前字声调影响，与带词汇声调的双音节词规律一致（Chuang et al., 2026）。此外，带有轻声的词具有特定音高特征，已在单音节（Jin et al., 2026）和双音节词（Lu et al., 2026b）中被记录。这些特征部分可由上下文嵌入向量预测，与词汇声调结果一致（Chuang et al., 2026; Lu et al., 2026b）。鉴于词汇声调本身也存在显著变异，我们提出：轻声在两岸普通话中均为词汇声调。研究还对比了两地轻声实现的异同，并利用上下文嵌入发现部分差异源于词语在不同语料中的语义使用差异。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The neutral, or floating, tone of Mandarin Chinese is a tone with an enigmatic set of properties. It has been described as a reduced tone, or as a tone that sometimes is lexically fixed but that can also be toneless. In two-syllable words, it is found only on the second syllable, but single-syllable words can also have the neutral tone. We present a corpus-based study of the phonetic realization of the neutral tone in spontaneous conversational speech corpora of Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin. We show that the neutral tone has its own tonal target, just as the four lexical tones of Mandarin. We also show that disyllabic words with a neutral tone have pitch contours that have a pitch component that depends on the tone on the first syllable, just as has been observed for two-syllable words with a lexical tone on the second syllable (Chuang et al., 2026). Furthermore, words with a floating tone have word-specific pitch signatures, which have also been documented for single-syllable words (Jin et al., 2026) as well as two-syllable words (Lu et al., 2026b). These word-specific pitch signatures are shown to be predictable to some extent from words' contextualized embeddings, as previously reported for lexical tones (Chuang et al., 2026; Lu et al., 2026b). As there is also considerable variability in the realization of lexical tones, we propose that the neutral tone is, in fact, a lexical tone in both Taiwan Mandarin and Beijing Mandarin. We document both similarities and differences in the realization of the floating tone in these two varieties and provide evidence, using contextualized embeddings, that some of the observed differences may arise from differences in the meanings of the words as used in the two corpora.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品；中文卡片由大模型生成，请以原文为准。