Contour-tone spreading and tone sandhi in Danyang Chinese

Phonology ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie K. M. Chan
Keyword(s):  
Tone Sandhi ◽  
Chinese Dialects ◽  
Tone Spreading

An important contribution to our knowledge of tone sandhi among the Chinese dialects is Lü's (1980) article on the tones and tone sandhi behaviour of Danyang, a Wu dialect of Chinese. Lü's description of Danyang is, to date, our only source on the dialect. While it is a northern Wu dialect, the tone sandhi patterning in Danyang differs from Shanghai, Suzhou, Wuxi and other dialects in the vicinity. There are a number of interesting problems related to tone in the dialect. This paper restricts the topic to only one of these problems, namely the treatment of the six basic tone patterns in Danyang, focusing in particular on the pattern in which a contour tone is copied Onto adjacent syllables in the tone sandhi domain.

Indirect tone-prominence interaction in Kunming tone sandhi

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hui-shan Lin
Keyword(s):  
Special Kind ◽  
Head Position ◽  
Tone Sandhi ◽  
Similar Correlation ◽  
Beijing Mandarin ◽  
Chinese Dialects

Abstract Kunming exhibits a special kind of interaction between tone and prominence whereby the prosodic headedness is shown to play an indirect role in tone sandhi. Due to higher-ranked tonal faithfulness constraints, lower tones, which are universally unfavored in the head position, do not change to higher tones, and higher tones, which are universally unfavored in the non-head position, do not change to lower tones. Nonetheless, though the unfavored tone-(non-)head correlation does not directly trigger tone sandhi, it indirectly decides whether tone sandhi will take place. Falling tones, inter-syllabic tone segment disagreement, and tonal combinations with identical contours are marked tonal structures in the language. But not all these structures result in tone sandhi. The penalization of these structures is tied to an unfavored tone-(non-)head correlation; only when an undesired tone-(non-)head correlation is involved are the marked tonal structures penalized. The indirect tone-(non-)head interaction observed in Kunming is special but not unique to the language as a similar correlation is found in the Chinese dialects of Dongshi Hakka and Beijing Mandarin.

PIG, TONE SANDHI AND WUMIN

1989 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-182
Author(s):  
William L. Ballard
Keyword(s):  
Potential Role ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Tone Sandhi ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
The Past ◽  
Language History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chinese Dialects ◽  
Historical Relationship

Several scholars have made various remarks about the language history of the Wu and Min areas. Some of these remarks concern non-Chinese languages that may have been spoken in the area(s) and that may have left some traces in the forms of Chinese spoken there now (substrata). Other remarks concern the possible prehistory of what appear now to be transitional or mixed forms, or features that may be present due to some ancient influence or borrowing. In considering such matters it is important to keep in mind the basic principles (and biases) of historical linguistics, and of the potential role of philological materials in the discussion. My fieldwork in China this spring, as well as my research in the past, point to some special historical relationship between southern Wu and northern Min. This appears to mean that the boundaries between the northern and southern types of each of the two dialect groups are stronger than they have been portrayed in the past, and that the traditional boundary between Wu and Min is considerably weaker than has been supposed. The total sum of dialect facts cannot be ignored in trying to ascertain the language history of this area; it would appear that various elements of the traditional view of the history of the southern dialects are in error in various ways. In particular, it is at least possible that Wu and Min, in some sense, share a common ancestor not common to any other Chinese dialects.

Forthcoming articles

2001 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 651-651
Keyword(s):  
Review Article ◽  
Tone Sandhi ◽  
Directed Motion ◽  
Functional Grammar ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
Comparative Syntax ◽  
Downstream Effects ◽  
Minimalist Approach ◽  
Left Dislocation ◽  
Chinese Dialects

Theodora Alexopoulou & Dimitra Kolliakou: On linkhood, topicalization and clitic left dislocationFrancis Cornish: ‘Downstream’ effects on the predicate in a Functional Grammar clause derivationAndrew Spencer: Gender as an inflectional categoryIda Toivonen: A directed motion construction in SwedishZ. Bao: Review article on MATTHEW Y. CHEN, Tone sandhi: patterns across Chinese dialectsR. Freidin: Remarks on basic syntax. Review article on P. CULICOVER, Principles and parameters: an introduction to syntactic theory; J. MCCAWLEY, The syntactic phenomena of English; A. RADFORD, Syntactic theory and the structure of English: a Minimalist approach; and I. ROBERTS, Comparative syntaxT. Langendoen: Review article on M. ARONOFF & J. REES-MILLER, The handbook of linguisticsS. S. Mufwene: Colonization, globalization and the plight of ‘weak’ languages: a rejoinder to Nettle & Romaine’s Vanishing voices. Review article on D. NETTLE & S. ROMAINE, Vanishing voices : the extinction of the world’s languages

Priming the Representation of Left-Dominant Sandhi Words: A Shanghai Dialect Case Study

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 362-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanbo Yan ◽  
Yu-Fu Chien ◽  
Jie Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Priming Effect ◽  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Semantic Knowledge ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Surface Form ◽  
Tone Sandhi ◽  
Auditory Priming ◽  
Tone Spreading ◽  
Shanghai Dialect

The paper aims to examine how the acoustic input (the surface form) and the abstract linguistic representation (the underlying representation) interact during spoken word recognition by investigating left-dominant tone sandhi, a tonal alternation in which the underlying tone of the first syllable spreads to the sandhi domain. We conducted two auditory-auditory priming lexical decision experiments on Shanghai left-dominant sandhi words with less-frequent and frequent Shanghai users, in which each disyllabic target was preceded by monosyllabic primes either sharing the same underlying tone, surface tone, or being unrelated to the tone of the first syllable of the sandhi targets. Results showed a surface priming effect but not an underlying priming effect in younger speakers who used Shanghai less frequently, but no surface or underlying priming effect in older speakers who used Shanghai more often. Moreover, the surface priming did not interact with speakers’ familiarity ratings to the sandhi targets. These patterns suggest that left-dominant Shanghai sandhi words may be represented in the sandhi form in the mental lexicon. The results are discussed in the context of how phonological opacity, productivity, the non-structure-preserving nature of tone spreading, and speakers’ semantic knowledge influence the representation and processing of tone sandhi words.

ACOUSTIC QUANTIFICATION OF TONE SPREADING IN DAISHAN AND MENDE

1989 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-80
Author(s):  
Takako TODA
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Fundamental Frequency ◽  
Tone Sandhi ◽  
Acoustic Phonetics ◽  
Acoustic Data ◽  
Acoustic Quantification ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Tone Spreading ◽  
Lexical Items

This paper examines the nature of ‘tone spreading’ in Daishan , a northern Wu dialect of Chinese, from the viewpoint of acoustic phonetics. It compares the mean falling fundamental frequency (FO) contour of disyllabic lexical items with that of monosyllabic citation forms in order to investigate if they are the same. The result shows that they are nearly identical, and therefore, demonstrates phonetic tone spreading as well as phonological tone spreading Acoustic data from Mende (Kupa Mende : Sierra Leone) are then presented and contrasted with those of Daishan. It is shown that the contouricity of the F О in fact differs between these two varieties. This result brings into question the autosegmentally based representation of tones using non-contour features such as HL, which has been commonly applied to the analysis of Wu tone sandhi. Finally, it is suggested that unitary contour features of tone, such as [falling], be applied in the case of Daishan tone spreading.

Tone Sandhi: Patterns Across Chinese Dialects (review)

Language ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 765-766
Author(s):  
Katia Chirkova
Keyword(s):  
Tone Sandhi ◽  
Chinese Dialects

Forthcoming articles

2001 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 465-465
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Tone Sandhi ◽  
Language Understanding ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
Minimalist Approach ◽  
Chinese Dialects ◽  
Analysis Of Variation ◽  
Dynamic Syntax ◽  
The Brain

A. Alexopoulu & D. Kolliakou: On linkhood and clitic left dislocationA. Cornilescu: Romanian nominalizations: case and aspectual structureD. A. Dinnsen, Kathleen M. O'Connor & Judith A. Gierut: The puzzle-puddle-pickle problem and the Duke-of-York gambit in acquisitionD. Lightfoot: Myths and the prehistory of grammarsG. Morgan, N. Smith, I. Tsimpli & B. Woll: Language against the odds: the learning of BSL by a polyglot savantJ. Romero Trillo: A mathematical model for the analysis of variation of discourseS. A. Schwenter: Discourse markers and the PA/SN distinctionH. Tanaka: Right-dislocation as scramblingE. Yuasa & J. M. Sadock: Pseudo-subordination: a mismatch between syntax and semanticsZ. Bao: Review article of MATTHEW Y. CHEN, Tone sandhi: patterns across Chinese dialectsD. Bickerton: Linguists play catchup with evolution (L. JENKINS, Bio-linguistics: exploring the biology of language and D. LORITZ, How the brain evolved language)R. Cann: Review article of R. KEMPSON, W. MEYER-VIOL & D. GABBAY, Dynamic syntax: the flow of language understandingR. Freidin: Remarks on basic syntax (P. CULICOVER, Principles and Parameters: introduction to syntactic theory; J. MCCAWLEY, The syntactic phenomena of English; A. RADFORD, Syntactic theory and the structure of English: a Minimalist approach; and I. ROBERTS, Comparative syntax)T. Langendoen: Review article of M. ARONOFF & J. REES-MILLER, The handbook of linguisticsN. B. Vincent: Review article of G. CINQUE, Adverbs and functional heads: a cross-linguistic perspective

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