Neutral Tone In Urumqi Chinese Dialect:Phonetic Description And Phonological Analysis

This thesis mainly focuses on the neutral tone in Urumqi Chinese dialect. Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang, is located in the northwestern part of China. The Chinese dialect spoken in Urumqi is composed of Urumqi Chinese dialect spoken by Han people and that spoken by Hui people. What have been discussed in this thesis is the Chinese dialect spoken by Han people (UHD). By using the method of experimental phonetics, the thesis described the phonetic properties of neutral tone in UHD from three aspects: duration, pitch and intensity. The results of the experiments show that in disyllabic sequences, the neutral tone in UHD has different characteristic from that in other Mandarin dialect: (1) the neutral-toned syllable has a similar duration with the stressed syllable. (2) the neutral tone can cause the sandhi of the preceding full tone. In order to find out whether the following tone will have any effect, the neutral tone was also tested in trisyllabic and quadrisyllabic sequences. Finally, the tone sandhi in UHD was analyzed by the autosegmental theory. The tone sandhi caused by neutral tone got a simple and correct explanation by a language specific tone spreading rule. It is proved that the tone sandhi and neutral tone in UHD can be explained in a unified manner.