An Analysis Of Tones In Shangqiu Dialect

This thesis aims at a detailed phonetic description of tonal information in Shangqiu dialect through an acoustic experiment and a phonological analysis of the tonal behavior of disyllabic tone sandhi within the framework of Optimality Theory. The following three aspects are studied in the thesis:citation tones, tone sandhi and the neutral tone's behavior in disyllabic sequences.This thesis is divided into five parts. The first part gives a brief introduction to Shangqiu dialect and also reviews the previous studies on the tonal system of Shangqiu. The second part presents the phonetic details and results obtained from the acoustic experiment. Four citation tones are found existing in Shangqiu dialect: yinping (24), yangping (51), shangsheng (45) and qusheng (41). T2 and T4 are both falling tones and have similar pitch values. However, their tonal behavior in disyllabic tone sandhi is different. Moreover, perception test proves that they are distinguishable to native speakers. So they belong to different tonal categories. And due to the difference in the slope of Fo contours of T2 and T4 as well as their different tonal behavior, the underlying forms of T2 and T4 are considered as 541 and 41 respectively. With regard to tone sandhi behavior in disyllabic sequences, the following patterns are found:T1→32/_{T2,T3}T2→54/_Tx(S, Sy1)T4→45/_T4Chapter 3 provides an Optimality Theoretical analysis of disyllabic tone sandhi in Shangqiu dialect, which is the focus of this thesis. It proves that the tonal behavior can find an explicit explanation within the OT framework.Chapter 4 presents the experimental results of the neutral tone in disyllabic sequences. The neutral-tone syllables in disyllabic sequences are also analyzed by the phonetic software because no tonal information is given about the neutral tone in any previous studies, either. However, neutral tone is not the focus of phonological analysis. According to the experimental results, the neutral tone in Shangqiu dialect is not as short as that in most of the Mandarin dialects.Chapter 5 is the conclusion of the whole thesis. Meanwhile, the respects waiting to be done in the author's future study are given in this part.