Abstract
This article is an acoustic study on the two types of neutral tone in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM). Recording materials included a set of verb-clitic constructions with different preceding tones and clitics. Pitch contours in different conditions were compared using Smoothing Spline ANOVA. Our results confirmed that Type 1 neutral tone (NT1) has a low pitch target and that Type 2 neutral tone (NT2) is contextually dependent. Whether NT1 or NT2 is chosen has been treated as the lexical idiosyncrasy of the clitics in question, with idiolectal and dialectal variations. However, we found in this study that the onsets have a bearing on determining the type of neutral tone: the more sonorous the onset, the more possible it is for the clitic to be in NT2. In sum, the two distinct types of neutral tones in TSM not only are unusual among the neutral tones in Sinitic languages, but they also offer novel data for the consonant-tone interaction.