An Optimality Theory Analysis Of Disyllabic Tone Sandhi In Jinan Dialect

Jinan Dialect belongs to Jilu Mandarin, a sub-branch of Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin is atypical tone language and Jinan dialect is no exception to it. During Recent years, therehave been a lot of works dedicating to solve the tone sandhi problem, of which theOptimality Theory is one of the most plausible.This thesis, based on the previous acoustic researches ever done on Jinan dialect, aims tosummarize a phonetic inventory and phonological analysis of the segments viaexperimental phonetics. Besides, it also targets at illustrating tones and tone structures withAutosegmental Phonology and to establish tone sandhi rules in disyllabic sequences inJinan dialect within Optimality Theory framework.After the explanatory account of the tone sandhi phenomenon and constraint-based model,Optimality Theory is employed, which proves that the tonal behavior in disyllabicsequences can be explicitly explained within the theoretical framework of five constraints.Two of them are faithefulness constraints:RM-IDENT-IO-T: The feature of the tone in the right position keeps unchanged.IDENT-IO-T: The output tone is identical to that of the input correspondent.Three of them are markedness constraints:OCP-T (HH. HH): Avoid adjacent HH tones at the tonal level.OCP-T (LL.LL): Avoid adjacent LL tones at the tonal level.*X.X: the final toneme and the initial toneme of two syllables cannot be the same.Consequently a highly efficient constraints‘ranking is formulated to account for the tonesandhis in Jinan dialect, which brings new methodology in Jinan dialect study and servesto enrich the typological researches on Chinese dialects.