When intonation overrides tone, part 5

There are three ways to say "Monday" in Mandarin:

zhōu yī 週一 lǐbài yī 禮拜一 (you can also say this in the shortened form bài yī 拜一) xīngqí yī / xīngqīyī 星期一

As usual with my classes at Penn, most of my students are from mainland China.  I asked one of them to pronounce those three ways of saying "Monday".  A student from Shangdong who speaks beautiful Mandarin read them this way:

zhōu yī 週一 lǐbài yī 禮拜一 xīngqīyì 星期一

It was immediately obvious that she pronounced the final syllable of xīngqīyī 星期一 with a falling intonation, hence xīngqīyì 星期一.  I asked her to repeat xīngqīyī 星期一 a couple more times, and each time she did it the same way, very consistently, xīngqīyì 星期一.  I asked why she pronounced xīngqīyī 星期一 with a falling intonation on the last syllable, and she seemed completely oblivious to the fact that she was pronouncing it that way, but everyone else in the class could hear clearly that she was pronouncing with a falling intonation.

 

Selected reading

• "When intonation overrides tone, part 4" (8/26/20)
• "When intonation overrides tone, part 3" (2/2/18)
• "When intonation overrides tone, part 2" (5/11/17)
• "When intonation overrides tone" (6/4/13)
• "Tones and the brain" (3/3/15)
• "'Ni hao' for foreigners" (10/11/16)
• "'Have a good day!' in Mandarin" (9/5/12)
• "Dissimilation, stress, sandhi, and other tonal variations in Mandarin" (8/26/2014)
• "Stress, emphasis, pause, and meaning in Mandarin" (1/18/17)
• "Speed vs. efficiency in speech production and reception" (9/11/19)
• "Matthew Pottinger's speech in Mandarin" (5/9/20)
• "slip(per)" (7/22/14)
• "Mandarin by the numbers" (6/8/13)
• "Where did Chinese tones come from and where are they going? " (6/25/13)
• "Pinyin memoirs" (8/13/16)
• "Tones for real" (2/5/18)
• "McWhorter on the global linguascape of 2115" (1/26/15)
• "John McWhorter responds" (1/29/15)
• "Homophonophobia" (2/7/15)
• "Homographobia" (9/27/10)
• "The wonder of Cantonese particles" (5/14/18)
• "Sorry, my Chinese is not so good" (6/6/17)
• "Surprising Transformations of a Beijing Street Name" (2/29/11)
• "A Northeastern topolectal morpheme without a corresponding character" (6/29/20)
• "Dongbei Survival Guide:  You can be funny and emotional in Dongbeihua, but be careful," by Ginger Huang, The World of Chinese
• "Northeastern Mandarin"
• "Russian Loans in Northeast and Northwest Mandarin: The Power of Script to Influence Pronunciation" (1/23/11)
• "Manchu loans in northeast Mandarin" (10/7/13)
• "Varieties of Mandarin" (10/25/17)
• "Triple topolectal reprimand" (5/29/16)
• "Our Taiwan" (11/19/13)
• "No character for the most frequent morpheme in Taiwanese" (12/10/13)
• "Taiwanese Morphemes in Search of Chinese Characters", by Robert L. Cheng (Zheng Liangwei), Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 6.2 (June, 1978), 306-314.
• "On swallowing and slurring in Pekingese" (5/3/19)
• "OMG moments induced by allegro forms in Pekingese" (1/26/12)