A group of words forming a distinctive unit in an utterance, containing a nucleus and optionally one or more other syllables before and after the nucleus.
〔语音〕声调群
Example sentencesExamples
In Fuzhou, for instance, only modifiers preceding the head or a single argument following the head can form a tone group with it.
This means that tone groups vary in duration, depending upon the number of syllables they contain.
The nucleus is often assumed to be the most prominent syllable in the tone group, but this is not always the case.
Functional pauses serve to divide discourse into tone groups and organize it into information units.
The tone groups in the spoken version are sometimes complete clauses but almost always very simple ones.