Experimental study on declination in Chinese intonation

The aim of designing sentences with special tone combinations is to investigate the declination tendency of intonation in Mandarin Chinese.The result shows that baselines of Prosodic Phrases (PP),as the basic declination units,show the phenomena of declination clearly,and the declination slope is in inverse proportion to the length of PP.Different tone combinations of PP have different declination slopes.The primary conclusions are as follows:(1) If low points are at the beginning of prosodic word,the absolute value of baseline slope is larger than those at the end; (2) The declination of PP is larger if it is at the beginning of sentences than that at the end.(3) The start-points of baselines of PPs fall in order when there are more than two PPs in one sentence,the declination pattern is relevant to syntactic-semantic relations between prosodic phrases.