An Acoustic Description And Non-linear Analysis Of The Neutral Tone In Changde Chinese

This research aims at a precise acoustic description of the reduced and toneless syllables and a nonlinear analysis of all the tonal phenomena pertaining to the neutral tone and the reduced tone in Changde Chinese. The neutral tone is the surface tone of a lexically toneless morpheme (usually represented as a syllable). The reduced tone is the surface tone of those morphemes which lose their lexical tones under certain conditions. The two main sub-theories of Nonlinear Phonology---- Autosegmental Phonology and Metrical Phonology ---- are the primary theoretical tools for the purpose of this research. In addition, this research also adopts some approaches proposed in Prosodic Phonology,Up till now, all the phonetic descriptions of Changde Chinese are auditorily based. Therefore, this research is the first one, employing experimental phonetics, to describe the acoustic features of the reduced and toneless syllables and the tonal system of Changde Chinese.At first, this research investigates the four citation tones in Changde Chinese, and discovers that Qusheng is a register-crossing rise. Secondly, this research has an acoustic analysis on the reduced and toneless syllables from the four perspectives of duration, intensity, pitch value and vowel quality. The result of the experiment shows: in Changde Chinese, the reduced syllable and the toneless syllable have the same acoustic manifestation--- the pitch contours of both are level and the pitch heights of both are mid. Neither syllable duration nor intensity nor vowel quality can distinguish the reduced or toneless syllable from the normal syllable in this language. Thirdly, the experiment studies the compounds of various structures and tonal combinations. The result shows: the reduced tone is not affected by the morpho-syntactic structures of the compounds containing the reduced tone, or by the preceding tone or the lexical tone of the reduced syllable. However, when the reduced syllable is lexically Shangsheng, it will retain its lexical Shangsheng and will not become a mid level. Similarly, the neutral tone is not influenced by the preceding tone of the toneless syllable. Lastly, this research studies the tonal reduction phenomenon within the tri-syllabic words, the quadri-syllabic words and some phrases. The experimental result shows that in a poly-syllabic word, all the non-initial syllables lose their lexical...