GHAPTER 1 Introduction

1.1 Background of prosodic study of natural languages

1.1.1 Function of prosody

1.1.2 Form of prosody

1.2 Mandarin prosody:issues and previous approaches

1.2.1 Introduction of Mandarin

1.2.2 Earlier studies on the interaction between tone and intonation

1.2.3 Previous studies on rhythmic accent

1.2.4 Recent studies:from data to modelling

1.3 Objective of the present study

1.3.1 The data of the study

1.3.2 Aplausible mapping between form and function

CHAPTER 2 Literature Review of Prosodic Study

2.1 Introduction

2.2 The British School

2.3 The Dutch School

2.4 The American School

2.4.1 The level approach

2.4.2 The Autosegmental-metrical approach

2.4.3 The ToBI labeling system

2.4.4 Pan-Mandarin system

2.5 Summary

CHAPTER 3 Speech Corpora and Labeling Methodology

3.1 Introduction

3.1.1 Daily-conversation corpus

3.1.2 Read-speech corpus

3.2 Data selection and labeling

3.3 Summary

CHAPTER 4 Three Functional Components of Mandarin Prosody

4.1 Introduction

4.2 Lexical tone

4.2.1 The functional role of lexical tone

4.2.2 The paradigmatic annotation of lexical tone

4.2.3 The autosegmental property of tone

4.2.4 The phonological representation of tone:level vs.contour systems

4.2.5 Tone sandhi in context

4.3 Rhythmic accent

4.3.1 Accentual hierarchy

4.3.2 The prosodic structure of Mandarin speech

4.3.3 Prosodic grouping and tone-sandhi domain

4.4 Intonation

4.4.1 The melodic events of Mandarin speech prosody

4.5 Summary

CHAPTER 5 Analysis by Synthesis of Mandarin Prosody

5.1 Introduction

5.2 Evaluating the predicted data with Prozed

5.3 Discussion

5.4 Summary

CHAPTER 6 Conclusion

Bibliography