Phonetic and semantic analyses of spoken corpora of Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin indicate that the neutral tone is a lexical tone

Yuxin Lu; Zhexuan Li; R. Harald Baayen

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arXiv · 2606.26360

Phonetic and semantic analyses of spoken corpora of Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin indicate that the neutral tone is a lexical tone

Yuxin Lu·Zhexuan Li·R. Harald Baayen

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Abstract

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.

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Yuxin Lu, Zhexuan Li, R. Harald Baayen. 2026-06-24. Phonetic and semantic analyses of spoken corpora of Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin indicate that the neutral tone is a lexical tone. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26360

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