An Experimental Study On Tones Of Ningjin Dialect

Ningjin whose dialect belongs to Jilu Mandarin is located in the northeast part of Xingtai,Hebei province.Based on experimental phonetics,a well-designed acoustic research concerning citation tones and tone sandhi rules of non-reduplicative as well as reduplicative(only noun and verb)disyllabic sequences of Ninejin dialect is carried out.The author first uses a sound analysis software Praat to do the annotation;then extracts data with the help of script and excel.Afterwards the data are processed and normalized,thus finally the T values of citation forms and tone sandhi rules of disyllabic sequences are obtained.The experimental results show that there are altogether four citation tones in Ningjin dialect:yinping(T1:22/33);yangping(T2:51/52);shangsheng(T3:55)and qusheng(T4:41/31).This finding is basically consistent with the previous research findings except for T2 whose pitch value is 53 in previous studies,but it is 52/51 in this study.As for tonal changes of non-reduplicative sequences,only the first syllable of T1 and T3 undergo tone sandhi while T2 and T4 never,and all the tonal changes have nothing to do with the syntactic structure.Specifically,when T1 is followed by T1 and T4.it changes into T3,meanwhile,when followed by T3.it turns into T4.When two T3s encounter,the first one becomes T2.By contrast,in reduplicative sequences,the results indicate that tonal modification is syntactically-dependent.Although tone sandhi still happens in the first syllable of the sequence when two Tls or T3s are adjacent,it performs differently in verb reduplicative sequences and the noun counterparts.Tone sandhi rules found in non-reduplicative sequences also hold true in verb reduplicative sequences.However,new tonal change rules occur in noun reduplicatives,in which T1 switches into T4 when it is before another T1 and T3 before another T3 changes into a new rising tone with 23/24.