A Study On The Tone Changes And Stress Patterns Of Overlapping Relative Appellation Words In Some Mandarin Dialects

This study is aimed at discussing the relationship between the tone change and stress,combined with the theory of Stress Pattern and the method of Experimental Phonetics by observing overlapping relative appellation words of some dialects in Mandarin area,and then it tries to verify a conclusion which was put forward by Hayes(1995)who considered that pitch is optimally chosen by left-headed stress and length is optimally chosen by right-headed stress inversely.Moreo ver,it attempts to explore if there is a strong correlationship between different contours and stress patterns when tones change.Considering that both different syntactic structures and segmental elements(including vowels and consonants)of non-reduplications will affect stress perception,only confining condition to the redup lications can it tend to obtain consistent language sense more easily.Therefore,this study focuses on the relative differences between pitch and length of both the former word and the latter word of overlapping appellation words in Mandarin area when tones change.Thereby,it tries to find the relationship between different tone changes and contours,and analyze the interaction between tone change and two types of stress patterns,by which it can make judgement on whether the stress is left-headed or right-headed,and the prominent element is pitch or length or both.Accordingly,it confirms Hayes(1995)'s conclusion that pitch is optimally chosen by the left-headed stress while length is the right-headed one.The achievements of this study are as follows: Firstly,the differences of social groups and usage environment like direct or indirect address when using overlapping appellation words are universally exist in Mandarin area.It proves that there are plenty of right-headed patterns,which differentiate with different tones and address forms in some northern dialects like Luoyang and Taiyuan.Secondly,it finds that there exist some tendentious correlationships between the prominence of stress and different contours,in which if contours of left-headed reduplications are high-and-low,foot patterns are inclined to use pitch to highlight;what if it is low-and-light,it will be length.And it also exists in the right-headed: if the heights of two tones are in the same level,the prominence of stress will be length;if it is low-and-high,it is likely to be pitch.Furthermore,Based on differences of all of internal phonetic elements of reduplications when tones change,it speculates that the occurrence of all of tone changes and differentiation phenomena is supposed to be driving by stress patterns.Finally,given that traditional description of tone change is highly complicated and it practically lags behind,this text offers a brand new way of strong and weak sound description for the sake of further stud y,which appeals for optimization and simplification.