Chinese Demonstratives and Their Spoken Forms in a Conversational Corpus

Abstract

Demonstratives are a particular group of linguistic expressions in Chinese, categorized as pronouns, determiners, adverbs, connectives, or fillers. Utilizing a phonetically labeled conversational corpus, we examined the spoken form of Chinese demonstratives in this study. Specific selection preferences for phonological variants were identified in the corpus. Filler demonstratives are generally longer than their lexical counterparts. Disyllabic lexical and filler demonstratives show seemingly contrasting duration patterns. Deviating from the falling tone carried by lexical originals, filler demonstratives tend to be flat with a mid-height onset, as illustrated by representative tonal contours obtained by a proposed computational tone model.