Multimodal research on tonal variations for pragmatic purposes in Mandarin

•Tonal variations of reduplicated kinship terms and proper names in everyday discourse (34.4% ∼ 43.8%) are significant (p < .01).•The multimodal analysis indicated that the pragmatic variations happened both between and within groups.•The rising tone as a “paratone” in TWSC is proposed for pragmatic purposes.

The aim of this paper was to explore how tonal variations occur in Standard Chinese (SC) and Taiwanese Standard Chinese (TWSC). An experimental research design was first conducted and integrated into a multimodal framework with 30 participants divided into two groups (SC and TWSC). The results of a Mann-Whitney U Test showed that the variations were significant between the two groups. Four phonological rules were then proposed. Additionally, three video clips were integrated into the multimodal study to explain how the tonal variations occur and how a low-rising tone is used for various pragmatic purposes and politeness strategies. The results were also confirmed using Praat to measure the pitch shape. It is suggested that tonal variations in different language layers such as rising tones are likely to occur for pragmatic purposes in TWSC.