从产生于观察角度来理解语言语气.pdfVIP

1 UNDERSTANDING TONE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF PRODUCTION AND PERCEPTION Yi Xu Department of Linguistics The University of Chicago 1. INTRODUCTION While few would doubt that there are physical limits to our speech production system, the act of speaking usually feels so effortless that it is often tempting to believe that in most cases we are safely away from those limits when speaking, and for that matter, when producing tones. Assuming that this intuition actually reflects reality, various phonological processes related to tones should then have little to do with articulatory limitations and are probably related more to perception than to production . Over the years, however, a number of phonetic studies have shown that tone production is subj ect to certain articulatory constraints (Abramson 1979; Gandour, Potisuk Dechongkit, 1994; Lin Yan, 199 1; Shih Sproat 1992; Xu 1994). Nevertheless, the role of articulatory constraints, often referred to broadly as coarticulation (Daniloff Hammarberg 1973; Hammarberg, 1982), is in general still considered to be rather limited as far as tone is concerned. And, in tonal phonology, there does not seem to be a strong need for treating articulatory constraints as part of the phonological process. In this paper, I would like to show that recent advances in experimental phonetics are starting to compel us to take articulatory constraints more seriously than before. In particular, I will show that the maximum speed of pitch change has recently been found to be slower than has been thought before, and that in tone production speakers