An Analysis Of Tones In Huailai Dialect

Based on acoustic data, this thesis tries to provide a detailed phonetic description and a phonological analysis of the tones in Huailai Dialect.The thesis can be divided into four parts. In the first part, the initials and finals of HLD are provided and also the review of tones in literature is presented. The second part shows the detailed process and result of the phonetic experiment, which is done by MiniSpeechLab. There are five citation tones in HLD, namely, T1 441, T2 542, T3 352, T4 51, T5 51. Seen from the spectrograms, there are four falling tones. Rusheng T5 can be easily distinguished from the other three since it ends with a glottal stop [(?) ] and has the shortest duration. After a perception test, T1, T2 and T4 are also distinguishable to native speakers. Their duration is arranged as follows: T1>T2>T4. In addition, the FO contours of these three falling tones are different Therefore T1, T2 and T4 belong to different tonal categories. As for tone sandhi, it is not mentioned in any literature, my discovery is shown below:T2+T2→T4+T2T3+T1→T2+T1T3+T3→ T2+T3T4+T4→T3+T4The neutral tone in disyllabic and trisyllabic sequences is determined by both phonetics and phonology, In disyllabic sequences, the starting point of the neutral tone co-articulates with the end point of the proceeding stressed tone, while the end point acquires a default value L. In trisyllabic sequences (S+N+S), the starting point of the neutral tone is caused by co-articulation, while its end point is determined by the tonal categories of the following stressed tone; hi the pattern S+N+N, the neutral tone in prepausal position is always 32 or 21 .The third part provides a phonological analysis of tone sandhi in disyllabic sequence and the neutral tone in disyllabic and trisyllabic sequences, which is accomplished by OT. It proves that OT can give a correct analysis of them.The last part ends with concluding remarks.