| This thesis aims to provide a description and analysis of the tone, tone sandhi and neutral tone in Yicheng Chinese, a sub-dialect of the Southwest Mandarin, within the framework of nonlinear phonology. Up to now, no specific exploration of phonetic description is made on this dialect, and no interpretation of its tone sandhi and neutral tone phenomena is available. This thesis is to build up the surface tone inventory, describe tone sandhi and neutral tone in Yicheng Chinese based on the fieldwork and the phonetic experiments; to give an interpretation of tone sandhi and neutral tone within the framework of nonlinear phonology based on the phonetic facts obtained in the acoustic experiment.Audio recordings are made from 8 native speakers. They are required to read out a list of words. All of their readings are recorded by particular software for further calculation and analysis. This extensive investigation covers citation tone, tone sandhi on the one hand and neutral tone on the other. About 5,000 daily used words are covered by my word list which is organized according to the combination of the four tones and further subcategorized into words considering morpheme relations,such as subject-predicate, verb-object, modifier-head,coordinate and verb-compliment. All of the words in my list are collected from everyday communication of the native speakers. Recording work is bisected into two parts, one is to record native speaker's pronunciation according to Survey Table of Dialects (Fangyan Diaocha Zibiao) in order to define the system of vowel & consonant & tone, the other is to record native speaker's speech via particular recording software with the help of laptop. The recording is made via software Cool Edit Pro 2.0 in a quite room in May, 2006. All the data gathered are demonstrated and analyzed by virtue of Praat 4.2.29, by which we get parameters including fundamental frequency (F0), rimal duration, amplitude and energy. Fundamental frequency and rimal duration are subsequently introduced into SPSS and calculated there. Main findings are summarized below:(1) In Yicheng Chinese, there are 18 consonants, 7 main vowels as well as 32 rhymes.(2) Four citation tones are found in Yicheng Chinese, namely, yinping, yangping, shangsheng and qusheng. Tone 1 (yinping) is a rising tone with tone value of 13; Tone 2 (yangping) is a falling tone with 42; Tone 3 (shangsheng) is a high level tone with 55 and Tone 4 (qusheng) is a concave tone with 412; Yicheng Chinese has one level tone, one rising tone, one falling tone and one concave tone. If we adopt Bao's tonal structure, with register added in, tones in Yicheng Chinese can be describe as:Diagram 3.2(3) In Yicheng Chinese, tone sandhi occurs on the first tone meanwhile remain the second tone in situ. That evidences the fact that, in bi-morphemic words, Yicheng Chinese is"initial morpheme sandhi"or"tone sandhi driven by the second morpheme". Unfortunately, different component relationship does not tell us much on tone sandhi. We do not find supportive evidence showing tone sandhi triggered by morphological organization. Besides, Tone sandhi falls heavily in Yicheng Chinese. When followed by Tone 1 and Tone 3, value of the preceding Tone 4 is altered from 412 into 43/32; Tone 4 is changed into 34/24 when shadowed by Tone 2 and Tone 4; Tone 1 is valued as 21 when followed by Tone 3; Tone 2 becomes 34 When accompanied by another Tone 2. These conclusions are schematized as follows: (4) Neutral tone in Yicheng Chinese is transcribed as 24 after Tone 1 and 21, 22, 21 respectively after the other three tones in the surface representation.(5) Neutral tone in Yicheng Chinese witnesses no change in its duration, amplitude and energy compared with the specified tones.Based on the findings, I conduct an analysis on the motivation and pattern of tone sandhi and the property of neutral tone and finally put forward an account from the perspective of autosegmental phonology.(1) Based on our findings, this thesis proposed a tone inventory of Yicheng Chinese. It modifies T4 as a falling tone, instead of a concave tone to meet underlying structure preserving regulation put forward by Bao[6]. Specification of Tone 4 is assumed to be [L, h l] to pave a way for further exploration.(2) The OCP motivates tone sandhi in Yicheng Chinese. The OCP disfavors the occurrence of identical feature specifications on adjacent autosegments. That makes HL*HL and H*HH sequences too marked in the combination of four tones. One way out of this trouble is to change the contour of the preceding tone. Tone Metathesis Rule regulates tone sandhi patterns in Yicheng Chinese.(3) In Yicheng Chinese, tone sandhi occurs only on the first morpheme. It can be preliminarily interpreted in terms of metrical phonology. Metrical phonology treats metrical foot as the domain of tone sandhi, within which iambic foot erase the tone parsed to the first morpheme. That makes the first tone change.(4) In the field of neutral tone, further exploration exhibit that neutral tone gets its contour from the preceding full tone and its register by default rule, since default tone in Yicheng Chinese always shows the same contour with the preceding tone meanwhile exhibit L register. (5) I also discussed the linear order of rule performance by comparison with Standard Chinese, consequence shows us that spreading rule should be put prior to default rule.The systematical phonetic description of the tone and tone sandhi in Yicheng Chinese contribute significantly to the study of Chinese Phonology. The phonological analysis has proved that the TBU in Yicheng Chinese is mora and Bao's[6] structure assumption is helpful to account for tone sandhi and neutral tone phenomena in it. Underspecification Theory is also testified capable in specifying default value.
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