A Phonetic And Phonological Description Of The Tone System In Xiangxiang Chinese

This thesis aims at a precise phonetic description of the tone system and a nonlinear analysis of all the tonal phenomena related to tone sandhi, neutral tone and reduced tone etc. in Xiangxiang Chinese on the phonetic basis.Up till now, all the phonetic descriptions of Xiangxiang Chinese are auditorily based. Therefore, this research is firstly employing experimental phonetics, to describe the acoustic features of the tone system of Xiangxiang Chinese and its related tonal phenomena such as tone sandhi, neutral tone and reduced tone etc. In the experiment, six informants (three males and three females) are required to read the glossary, which is prepared ahead by the researcher.Generally speaking, the glossary is divided into the glossary for the citation tone, the glossary for the tone sandhi and the glossary for the neutral tone. The glossary for the citation tone includes 180 syllables; while the glossary for the tone sandhi includes 656 disyllabic words which are organized in accordance to various morpho-syntactic structures like modifier-head, verb-object, subject-predicate, verb-complement and co-ordination and the citation tones of the first and second syllable. Given the fact that there are five lexical tones in Xiangxiang Chinese, the disyllabic words are subdivided into 5×5 = 25. And the glossary for the neutral tone, on the other hand, is arranged according to the preceding tones of all the fifteen toneless suffixes and particles, all together 299 disyllabic words and 89 trisyllabic words.This phonetic experiment investigates the tone system in Xiangxiang Chinese, including five citation tones besides a neutral tone—they are Yinping, Yangping, Shangsheng, Yinqu and Yangqu which are numerically marked as 55, 23, 21, 45, and 22 respectively.Secondly, this research has an acoustic analysis on the toneless syllables from the perspective of duration, intensity, pitch value and vowel quality. The result of the experiment shows: the acoustic manifestation of the toneless syllable in Xiangxiang Chinese is that the pitch contour is level; the pitch height is mid; and the duration of the neutral tone is much shorter than that of the full tone, 60-70% to be exact.Thirdly, this research combines the full syllables according to five citation tones and various morpho-syntactic structures. However, from the phonetic diagrams, we cannot find any meaningful tone sandhi in Xiangxiang Chinese.There is no spreading in the tone-obtaining process of the neutral tone and the neutral tone obtains a mid level tone by default rule in Xiangxiang Chinese. Because of the difference in duration, I assume that mora is the tone-bearing unit in Xiangxiang Chinese. And the neutral tone being always shorter than the full tone in duration can be the proof that the shortness in duration is an essential property of the neutral tone. Because the amplitude of the neutral tone can be weaker, identical or stronger than that of the full tone, the weakness in amplitude is not an essential property of the neutral tone. The difference between the neutral tone and the full tone in vowel quality, which is shown by the formant, is not obvious. Therefore formant is also not an essential property of the neutral tone either.Xiangxiang Chinese is such a virgin land that the full description on the tone system of Xiangxiang Chinese will at least offer the basic information and leave a base for further study of the coming scholars, but also it will provide linguists with more materials for research on different tonal phenomena. Phonologically, this research is also significant for the structure of contour tone, the TBU in Chinese, the default tone in Chinese and the tone operative mechnism in Chinese.