Tone Sandhi In Prosodic Words: An OT Perspective

Optimality Theory (OT) breaks off the confines of the derivation by the ordered rules and concentrates on the ranking of constraints, which has a powerful explainability in latest 20 years. It provides the new perspectives for research of sound patterns and approaches to phonological analysis. This current research is meant to describe and explain tone sandhi in prosodic words under the OT framework, to expound and develop OT through the analysis and discussion about actual language phenomenon under specific context.Within the OT framework, this thesis gives a detailed phonetic description and a phonological analysis of the tone sandhi in prosodic words of both 2 and 3 syllables. The research conducted is acoustic data-based. The tone sandhi phenomenon, as found in some tone languages, is to be interpreted in terms of constraints ranking.Zhucheng dialect is selected to be the object for the case study. Aided by Praat, the free software for speech analysis developed by Paul Boersma from the University of Amsterdam, acoustic experiment has been made. The results indicate that there are four citation tones in Zhucheng dialect: T1(Yinping)214, T2(Yangping)53, T3(Shangsheng)55, T4(Qusheng)31, laballed with Chao's tone letter system as LLH (T1), HL (T2), HH (T3), LL (T4) respectively. Subsequent observation of disyllabic and trisyllabic sequences brings to light six tone sandhi rules: (1) TI+T1: LLH+LLH→LH+LLH (2) TI+T4: LLH+LL→LH+LL (3) T3+T1: HH+LLH→HL+LLH (4) T3+T3: HH+HH→HL+HH (5) T3+T2: HH+HL→HLH+HL (6) T3+T4: HH+LL→LH+LLGuided by OT, the research attempts to account for the sandhi tone by means of phonological constraints. Tone sandhi in the prosodic words of Zhucheng dialect can be verified with a set of hierarchically ranked constraints: R.IDENT >> S-HL/LL >> *T(level), *Tx.Tx, XYZ.HL >> DEP >> *OC, IC, *XYZ.XYZ >> O-LH.LL >> MAX >> IDENT. It concludes that the explainability of OT for tone sandhi in the prosodic words of Zhucheng dialect. The research of tone sandhi in special context provides the new parameter for OT, which expand the new consideration within OT framework.