Tone Sandhi In Jiaonan Dialect: An Optimality Theoretical Account

Based on the acoustic data, the thesis aims at providing phonetic description and phonological analysis of the tones and tone sandhi of disyllabic sequences in Jiaonan dialect, within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT).Up until now, the studies on Jiaonan dialect are auditorily based and are confined to the description of the surface tones. Neither phonetic experiment nor phonological analysis has been involved. The present study attempts to report the tonal inventory in Jiaonan dialect based on the experimental phonetics; to illustrate the underlying tones and their phonological structures within the framework of Autosemental Phonology; to conduct an OT analysis on the tone sandhi patterns in Jiaonan dialect.Firstly, tonal expressions should be carried out through the softwears PRAAT 4.4.20 and SPSS 13.0. The sounds documents are from the field work that the author did in 2009 and 2010. The test words include 111 monosyllabic words in citation forms and 214 words in disyllabic sequences in consideration of the 16 (4*4) combinations. Eight native speakers from Jiaonan attended the audio recording. The phonetic facts indicate that there are three citation tones in Jiaonan dialect, for the tendency of merging from four-tone system to three-tone system. However, there are four base tones in the disyllabic sequences, namely, yinping (T1,214), yangping (T2,51), shangsheng (T3,55) and qusheng (T4,31), and tone sandhi occurs among these four tone combinations. Here, neutral tones have not been considered in this thesis. Disyllabic tone sandhis are as follows: T1â†'T2/ T1 T2â†'34/ T4 T3â†'T2/ T1 T3â†'T1/ T2 T3â†'T2/ T3 T4â†'T3/ T4 Secondly, taking the geometrical model proposed by Bao (1990) for reference, the underlying tonal structure and the tone sandhi mechanism are represented. Finally, the thesis concentrates on explanatory account of the tone sandhi phenomenon and the constraint-based model, Optimality Theory, is employed. It proves that the tonal behavior in disyllabic sequences can be explicitly explained with the help of the constraints ranking hierarchy below.RM-IDENT-IO-T>>*H.HH, OCP-T,*[±U][±U]>>* Level>>*X.Y>>IDENT-IO-T(R), IDENT-IO-T(C)...