Phonological Analysis Of Vowel Reduction Of Standard Chinese

As speech is a continuous process, sounds are always continuously uttered. Due to the influence of their neighbors, or the difference of speed, height and strength in speech, many sound changes can happen to the original phoneme in actual speech. These changes can exist in such phonological processes as assimilation, dissimilation, reduction, elision and so on, which are shown in different ways of embodiments by related languages.Much research work related to sound changes has been done to cover a variety of aspects in phonological research. However, there are fewer studies that focus on systematic analysis of vowel reduction in speech sounds of Standard Chinese (SC) than in some other languages, though SC is the most widely used language in the world.In SC, there is a unique linguistic phenomenon called neutral tone. No matter where we place the stress in Chinese words, the neutral tone must be unstressed syllables.This thesis focuses on one aspect of feature change in vowels—vowel reduction, and gives a (mainly) OT analysis in an attempt to find out the motivation, procedure, and influence of such kind of change.