An Experimental Study On The Tones Suqian Dialect

Suqian City, located in the north of Jiangsu Province, is the transition zone of Zhongyuan mandarin and Jianghuai mandarin on linguistics. The research on tones of this area was mainly focus on the traditional depiction on dictation, listening and speaking. And the information about disyllabic tone sandh is extremely rare. For a comprehensive and sophisticated tone feature of Suqian dialect, this thesis focuses on the deepen study of experimental phonetics in tones system in Suqian City and three counties under its jurisdiction.This thesis is composed of six chapters.The first chapter displays a brief introduction to Suqian, the review of previous experimental studies and current study on Suqian dialect. The purpose and methods of this thesis are also explained.The second chapter is the explanation of experimental studies on Suqian dialect,including experimental processes, preparations and core theories and formulas involved in the experiment.The third chapter describes the experiment of the pitch and duration in four districts spoken in Suqian dialect, and draws tone pattern diagrams. Comparing with the traditional research achievement, this thesis analyzes the causes of the differences.The fourth chapter refers to the studies on disyllabic tone sandhi from pitch and duration, and to summarize on the sandhi patterns in each dialect district, and to make analyses on its tone features.The fifth chapter is a summary about the features of Suqian dialect, make a comparison and classification internally, including analysis of tone type and tone range,and find the regular pattern between tone type and duration. Make a deepen study on the three dialect districts of Hongchao dialect area of Jianghuai dialect in Suqian,comparing from three aspects which are pitch, performance of monosyllabic and bi-syllabic tone in duration and the retention of glottal stop. And we found that currently the rusheng laxation is divided into three stages in this region, rusheng duration are not all briefness, only Sihong retains a clear glottal stop, and there is a direct relationshipbetween glottal stop and rusheng duration, which is more briefness relatively when retained glottal stop.The sixth chapter, the conclusion of this thesis, overviews the study achievement,indicates the shortcomings in this thesis and the direction for future studies.