An Analysis Of Tones In Feixiang Dialect

Based on acoustic data, this thesis tries to provide a detailed phonetic description and a phonological analysis of the tones in Feixiang Dialect.This thesis is divided into four parts. In the first part, the initials and finals of Feixiang Dialect are provided and also the review of tones in literature is presented. The second part shows the detailed process and result of the phonetic experiment, which is done by Praat. There are five citation tones in Feixiang Dialect, namely Tl (31), T2 (51), T3 (55), T4 (313) and T5 (3). Therefore, in Feixiang Dialect, there are a low falling tone, a high falling tone, a high level tone, a falling-rising tone and a low entering tone. As for tone sandhi, it is not mentioned in any literature. The discovery is as follows:T1→T3/_{T1, T2, T4, T5} T4→T1/_T3T3→T2/_T3 T4→T2/__T4T4→35, 25}/_{T1, T2, T5} T5→5/_{Tl, T2, T4, T5}In disyllabic sequences, the tonal expression of neutral tone falls into two kinds: i. the pitch values of the starting points of the neutral tones after Tl, T2, T3 and T5 is determined by the end points of the preceding stressed syllables, while the end points uniformly acquires a default value of 1; ii. the pitch value of the neutral tone after T4 acquires a value of 3, with the T4 becoming 31 at the same time, showing a kind of spreading of the original tone pattern of T4 (313) onto the whole sequence.The third part of this thesis concentrates on explanatory account of the tone sandhi phenomenon and the realization of neutral tone in Feixiang Dialect, where a constraint-based model, Optimality Theory, was employed. It proves that the tone sandhi and the behavior of neutral tone of Feixiang Dialect can be explicitly explained in the framework of OT.The last part is a conclusion of the whole thesis.