On Tones Of Prepositions In Xi’an Hui People’s Dialect

Tones of Prepositions in Xi’an Hui people’s dialect present themselves in a complex form.Firstly,prepositions in phrases are inclined to change into [21] tone,which is supposed to be regraded as a grammatical tone sandhi;secondly,the phonological environment simultaneously impacts on the tone of each preposition concretely by means of the tone sandhi of consecutive [21] tones,meanwhile the syntactic structure frames the sandhi domain.This dissertation draws a distinction between the tone sandhi types of prepositions in Xi’an Hui people’s dialect and elaborates the distribution of different tone sandhi types.The specific distribution,as well as the contributing factors,of the grammatical tone sandhi of prepositions are explained through the theories of prepositional grammaticalization,diachronic linguistics and linguistic typology.It can be concluded that prepositions in Xi’an Hui people’s dialect are grammaticalized from verbs and the tones of prepositions change meanwhile semantic bleaching is carried out,hence the nature of the preposition tone undertaking the grammatical sandhi is closer to neutral tone other than Yinping tone.At the same time,different prepositions,because of varying degrees of grammaticalization and syntactic statuses,are of unbalanced acceptability of [21] tone.Compared with other dialects in Guanzhong area near Xi’an,prepositions of Xi’an Hui people’s dialect are more commonly articulated as [21] tone in phrases.