Tone Sandhi for Suffixes?

[Superangel]

Hi everybody!

This is my first post, so please be gentle!

I've been learning Chinese for a while now, and like most people I have a basic but shakey grasp of tone sandhi for third tones, 不 and 一.

However, I recently picked up a book (Situational Chinese by the people over at NTU) which shows pinyin after tone sandhi (e.g. ke2yi3 instead of ke3yi3).

What caught my eye is they generally drop tones from common 'suffixes' (probably not the correct term?). For example ...

• 起來 is qi3lai5 rather than qi3lai2
  
• 時候 is shi2hou5 rather than shi2hou4
  
• 一下 is yi2xia5 rather than yi2xia4
  

Is this actually tone sandhi or are they just replicating how most people speak. I've asked my native speaker friends, but they're not sure either (because they never learnt tones like we do).

What do you think? I've not heard of this 'rule' before, but it does sound natural in the right context. The book itself mostly skips over tone sandhi in the introduction, but NTU ought to know its stuff, right?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

[renzhe]

Neutral tone is not a result of tone sandhi -- some tones simply get dropped as a result of becoming less stressed over time. There are no good rules about this, unfortunately.

In the examples you posted, you could also use the full tone, and it would still be correct.

[Daan]

Tone sandhi is when the tone of the next syllable influences the tone of a syllable, so for example when you say Wǒ bú kàn shū. in which kàn influences the tone of bù and turns it into a second tone, bú. As renzhe said, in cases such as yíxia instead of yíxià you're not looking at tone sandhi, but at neutralisation. In your examples, the tone of the last syllable is not being influenced by any other syllables in its vicinity; rather, it vanishes altogether. Whether you should use these neutral-tone pronunciations in your own speech depends on which word you want to use, and where you are.

In Northern China, neutralisation is far more common than in Taiwan (where I guess you may be studying, if you're using an NTU textbook). A good piece of advice would be to try and mimic local speakers' pronunciation. If you find this difficult to tell just by listening to their pronunciation, you can always ask them. They may not be able to tell you the linguistic background, but they can surely tell you whether you should say yíxià or yíxia: when in doubt, just try to pronounce both and see which they prefer. As you said, adopt whatever pronunciation sounds natural to them.

In Northern China, this is even more important, as some words are distinguished by neutralisation only. For example, dōngxī means 'East and West' and dōngxi means 'thing' (a so-called minimal pair). In Taiwan, dōngxī is used for both. But most neutral-tone pronunciations are merely alternatives, co-existing with the full pronunciations. Sometimes the neutral-tone pronunciation is better, though: the best example that springs to mind is that you should almost always use shi 'to be' instead of shì 'to be' if you don't want to sound too bookish, even in Taiwan.

Good luck with your studies!

[Superangel]

renzhe & Daan, thank you both so much!

I nnow understand my mistake regarding tone sandhi and tone neutralization. The difference is clear

Daan, thanks also for the difference between usage in Northern China and Taiwan; it's very useful for me.

Thanks again!