Tone sandhi of young speakers’ Taiwanese

Abstract

This paper addresses young Taiwanese speakers’ tone sandhi. A young speaker’s language is often a mixture of Taiwanese and Mandarin; though understanding Taiwanese, he/she frequently responds in Mandarin. This paper establishes a corpus of ‘young Taiwanese’, which reveals three different tone sandhi patterns from ‘general Taiwanese’. First, a j-break (sandhi domain break) may occur after a Xhead. Second, a j-break may occur after an adjunct XP. Finally, a j is restricted within three syllables. Young speakers seldom speak long Taiwanese expressions; they tend to break a long string into short fragments and match them with smaller syntactic or prosodic junctures.