Tones for 可不可以？

[Guest realmayo]

The 可 of 可以 is obviously pronounced 2nd tone.

How often would you expect to hear 可不可以blahblahblah spoken with the first 可 as second tone? Would it be more likely to occur during particularly strong emphasis?

 

 

[Demonic_Duck]

I think the first 可 is always 3rd tone, whether or not emphasized. Sounds awkward to me with 2nd tone.

[Tomsima]

I agree with the emphasis, as otherwise 可以吗 structure more likely to be used. Which would mean you would typically get a full tone contour of 3423 (simply put, obv sandhi will cause it to be ever so slightly different)

[Guest realmayo]

I wasn't too clear about emphasis, I kind of meant 可不可以 as a kind of rhetorical device, 可不可以 this, 可不可以 that, 可不可以 any of this.

 

Here's the clip - I just happened to hear it, noticed a clear second tone, I assumed it was sandhi related ("sandhi reverse drift"? ), and wondered if it was exceptional or more common.

 

If not sandhi related then I suppose the simpler and more boring explanation is that the 可 is indeed intended (and perceived) as a 3rd tone, which then extends upwards in order to give enough height for the 4th tone to descend from.

 

 

[丁二]

In fact, the crux of the matter is "Tone sandhi".

 

There’s a rule in Chinese, which is that when a group of syllables is consist of two 3rd tone syllables, the first syllable may change to 2nd tone.

 

For example, 你 and 好 are both 3rd tone. But when saying “你好” as a word, 你 is often be pronounced as the 2nd tone.

 

So In the word “可不可以”, the first 可 is pronounced as the 3rd tone because there’s nothing special, but the second one is consisting a group with 以 which is also a 3rd tone. That’s why it sounds like a 2nd tone.

 

That is not to say you have to change the tone whenever speak a word like this. But in most cases it can make your pronunciation more natural.

[Guest realmayo]

Thank you 丁二. But in my example (you can listen to it) the first 可 is pronounced in 2nd tone too.

[丁二]

On 5/4/2022 at 5:28 PM, realmayo said:

Thank you 丁二. But in my example (you can listen to it) the first 可 is pronounced in 2nd tone too.

 

Didn't mention the audio you posted before.

 

As a native speaker, I'm pretty sure the first 可 is still 3rd tone. But I can also understand why it sounds like 2nd tone.

 

I think it is because the whole sentense is in a questioning context, which makes the tone sounds like going up a little.

 

But I'm not a professional linguist, may be there's a term for this kind of tone that sounds like between 2rd and 3rd. But at least for me, I can tell there is a rather significant turning point.

[Guest realmayo]

Thanks, that's very helpful.

 

I think "tone" is what a native speaker perceives, whereas "pitch" is the actual sound, measured by a machine (or by a non-native speaker).

 

So perhaps this "rising 可" is a third tone which is altered by a rising pitch, in order to make it sound a more exaggerated question.

 

I'll post a clip of the full sentence, which has three three different 可不可以s in a row.

 

In the first 可不可以, the first 可 is clearly rising. In the second 可不可以, the first 可 is as you'd expect. In the third 可不可以, the first 可 is clearly rising again.

 

Here's the Praat analysis of only the three 可不可以s (boxed in red) and a little bit of their surrounding speech.

 

 

The other possible explanation is that it's a "full" 3rd tone in a place where you'd normally expect a truncated 3rd tone.

 

I wonder if it would be natural for the same thing to occur with other 3rd tone characters.

For example, would people happily pronounce 你 with a rising pitch in 你去？还是他去？... if they were really shocked and questioning in the first 你去 part? or is this a phenomenon that is restricted to either  (a) 可 or (b) 3rd tones that come before 不.

 

It's 100% normal for natural speech to differ from textbook speech, but when if differs consistently, then I think it's particularly interesting for the language learner.

 

 

[anonymoose]

I don't think tones are as rigid as textbooks make them out to be. I live with a native Chinese speaker, and I frequently note syllables pronounced in non-standard tones. I don't think this is dialectal, because she pronounces tones correctly when spoken deliberately or in isolation.

 

Just as English has a variable pitch contour on individual words and sentences as a whole, so does Chinese, which will inevitably make each syllable deviate from its standard pitch contour. From your clip, it sounds like the first 可 is being stressed, and that probably explains the tone shift, as you stated.

 

From the Praat graphs you posted, clearly there is variability in pitch between the three times the phrase is said. If the textbooks are correct, though, the first 可 can't be in the 2nd tone because this should finish at the same pitch as the beginning of the 4th tone (presumably the 不 is the big slide down in the middle).

[Guest realmayo]

On 5/6/2022 at 1:56 AM, anonymoose said:

I don't think tones are as rigid as textbooks make them out to be.

This is true like 10,000 percent! I can understand why textbooks need to have a little chart but as soon as people have learned "that's second tone in theory" etc, then they should never think about the little chart every again. Real-life "pitch" is hugely different to the perceived "tone" but of course in a tonal language it's the perceived tone which tells you what the word means (or rather, is "lexically-contrastive").

 

On 5/6/2022 at 1:56 AM, anonymoose said:

presumably the 不 is the big slide down in the middle

Ha! in the third one, most of that big slide down is the second 可！The first 可 rises, then at the end of the rise, the 不 starts - as you can see the 不 appears to go down, then up, then and then starts going down, before the 可 takes over for most of that big slide down. (I don't actually think the pitch of the 不 is properly captured by the software because it's short and explosive, but the two 可s are captured well and as you can see, the first one looks like a rising tone and most of the second looks like a falling tone!)

 

In basically every normal sentence spoken by perfect 普通话 speakers there are loads of places where pitch is different from what the textbooks predict: some small differences, some drastic differences. That's not variation from person to person, it's just how 普通话 is supposed to sound, and how 普通话 is supposed to sound is different from what the textbooks say.

 

Many of these changes will be regular and repeated and also observed in other tonal languages. I read a book called "Tone" recently and was surprised that the majority of the world's languages (though almost none in Europe, and almost no Australasian languages) are tonal.

 

But tonologists (!) can't even decide if contour tones (e.g. second tones) communicate their tonal quality by (a) the contour or (b) the change. So is a second tone heard as a second tone because (a) it is heard to rise, or (b) because it starts at one level and ends at another? They can't decide.

 

Also it seems when you hear a word, your brain registers the tone last, after all the other information. So that might be why in some cases "tones don't matter", or at least, why they can be messed around with successfully to communicate non-lexical information.