Tonal Acoustics Of Shishan Southern Min

This thesis attempts to provide a detailed acoustic description of tones and tone sandhi of the variety of Southern Min spoken in Shishan Town,Nan’an City,Fujian Province,in terms of the acoustic properties of fundamental frequency（F₀）and duration.In previous studies,the transcription of tones in most other Southern Min varieties is based merely on auditory impression.This study investigates the tonetics of Shishan Southern Min instrumentally by exploring the acoustic properties of tones produced in three forms–tones in isolation（monosyllabic tones）,tones on the finals of disyllabic tonal sequences（final tones）and tones on the non-final syllables of disyllabic tonal combinations（sandhi tones）.The methodologies of linguistic fieldwork,auditory phonetics and acoustic phonetics have been employed to investigate the nature of Shishan tones.The experimental data are collected from interactions with ten native speakers in the field by dint of an elicitation procedure.The acoustic measurements of the informants show,among other things,a great deal of between-speaker variations.To reduce these variations,numerous normalisation methods for F0 and duration are compared,and a feasible one is adopted for this research.The numerical evaluation of F0 normalisation methods is based on two indicators-Dispersion Coefficient（DC）and Normalisation Index（NI）.Zhu（1995）’s LZ normalisation strategy has been adopted to quantify F0 after the evaluation of 19 different methods.On the ground of the data obtained,the author gives an auditory account for the tone sandhi of disyllabic expressions and presents the tonology of Shishan Southern Min.The study attests that Shishan Southern Min has all of the eight tones that are traced back to Middle Chinese,but the citation tones of Yinqu（阴去）and Yangqu（阳去）have been merged into a low falling over the course of the development of this language.Thus,in effect,there only remain seven citation tones today in Shishan Southern Min,namely a middle high,a rising tone,a high level,a middle high falling,a low falling,a high falling and a low rising.However,eight sandhi tones are still preserved in Shishan Southern Min.