Trisyllabic Word Tone Sandhi In Yiyang Dialect

This thesis attempts to describe the acoustic properties and develop a non-linear phonological analysis of trisyllabic word tone sandhi in Yiyang Dialect(hereafter YYD),including:(1) The pitch model demonstrated by the tone sandhi of trisyllabic word in YYD(2)the relationship between disyllabic word tone sandhi and trisyllabic word tone sandhi(3) the effect of metrical and morpho-syntactical structures on sandhi position and the directionality of sandhi rules.Cui Zhenhua(1998) gives a preliminary summary of the tone sandhi regularities in YYD disyllabic words. According to him, YYD tone sandhi happens at metrically weak positions. Lu Manli(2006) conducts an acoustic study of YYD disyllabic tone sandhi and confirms the basic claims made by Cui Zhenhua(1998). What lacks in all the above study is that none gives a substantive description and analysis of YYD trisyllabic word tone sandhi.Based on the data of trisyllabic words collected from my fieldwork and the acoustic experiments conducted in 2014, the result shows that trisyllabic word tone sandhi is similar to that of disyllabic word in YYD, but trisyllabic word tone sandhi is more complicated and they have some differences.Firstly, in terms of the sandhi values for the five citation tones, the scenarios in trisyllabic tone sandhi are similar to those in disyllabic word tone sandhi, but there is also some discrepancy in the sandhi values of shangsheng and qusheng. In the thesis, this discrepancy is analyzed and it is hypothesized that the possible sandhi mechanisms are simplification and neutralization. Based on this fact, the thesis concludes that the directionality of sandhi is from left to right and the sandhi domain is foot.Secondly, the “non-head stress” hypothesis by Duanmu(1990) is adopted to explain what may determine the metrically light or heavy positions in trisyllabic word tone sandhi. Most of our data conform to what the above hypothesis predicts. However, there is an exception,(V+N1)+N2,whose sandhi position is different from what the above theory predicts. It is argued that the above discrepancy may result from the overriding effect on the inner layer imposed by the outer layer.Thus, when there is a stress clash caused by the outer layer and by the inner layer, the former should be respected.Finally, the tonal representation of Bao(1999) is adopted and two phonological rules are proposed to derive the surface sandhi tones: the Register Assimilation Rule and the ContourSimplification Rule. The short duration of the unstressed syllable is due to the delinking of the x-slot caused by the dropping of the left contour element of the citation tone, and then due to Register Assimilation Rule, it obtains a surface value with the same register of its front syllable.