A Phonological Analysis Of Tone Sandhi In Pingyuan Dialect

The thesis attempts to give a detailed phonetic description of citation tones of Pingyuan dialect as well as its bisyllabic and trisyllabic tone sandhi by using the method of experimental phonetics, and more importantly it makes phonological analyses of the tone sandhi phenomenon and works out its phonological rules within the framework of Optimality Theory.At first, the thesis briefly introduces the initials and finals of Pingyuan dialect and reviews the previous studies on dialects, including the tone sandhi study at home and abroad, especially the tone sandhi in Shandong dialect. But so far, there lacks systematic analysis of tone sandhi of Pingyuan dialect, especially phonological analysis.By means of phonetic experiment, this study analyzes the collected data of Pingyuan dialect, and by aid of Praat 4.4.20 soft-ware, the thesis makes an acoustic analysis of the recording material from three aspects, which include tones in citation form, tone sandhi in disyllabic sequence as wll as tone sandhi in trisyllabic sequence (reduplicates and neutral tone excluded). The study shows that Pingyuan dialect consists of four citation tones:T1 [24], T2 [42], T3 [44], T4 [21]. The tone sandhi in disyllabic sequence (reduplicates and neutral tone excluded) can be presented below:(1) T2+T4â†'T3+T4 HL+LLâ†'HH+LL(2) T3+T1â†'T2+T1 HH+LHâ†'HL+LH(3) T3+T2â†'T1+T2 HH+HLâ†'LH+HL(4) T3+T3â†'T2+T3 HH+HHâ†'HL+HH (5) T4+T4â†'T1+T4 LL+LLâ†'HH+LLThe trisyllabic tone sandhi of Pingyuan dialect is grounded on the disyllabic tone sandhi, so their sandhi rules are in consistent with disyllabic sandhi rules basically.Based on experimental phonetic analysis, the study gives phonological explanations of tone sandhi phenomenon in light of OT. It turns out that disyllabic and trisyllabic tone sandhi patterns of Pingyuan dialect are the result of the ranking of 13 constraints relevant, which can be formulated in this way:R-IDENT-T >> OCP (L),*HH.XY >> IDENT(HL.T.T)-IO >>*L.LL >> IDENT-IO >>*LL >> OCP (C), OCP’(L) >>*L.HH.L,*H.HL.H>>*XH.XH >>*L.HL. As a result, it has revealed the phonological motivation for the complicated tone sandhi phenomenon of Pingyuan dialect.