Comparison Of Tones Between Old And New Laiwu Dialect

Laiwu is located in the central part of Shandong Province.It is a prefecture-level city before and now it belongs to Jinan.Laiwu dialect is inside range of Liaotai area of Jilu Mandarin.On the basis of field investigation and existing achievements,this paper aims to make a systematic and detailed description and analysis to the tone information of new and old Laiwu dialect,i.e.monosyllabic tone and the phenomenon of tone-sandhi.In this regard,the division between the new LWD and the old group is mainly based on age and then the tonal change of LWD can be revealed naturally.Through a detailed investigation and data analysis,the research findings of this paper are presented as follows:First of all,it is necessary to point out that the study on monosyllabic tone of LWD is slightly different from that of predecessors,but the results of the latter one also appear in the experimental outcome of this paper.Different from the traditional dialect study,there are altogether 30 informants and it is objectively representative.The main conclusions of the study on monosyllabic tones of LWD in this paper are as follows:(1)There are altogether four tones in LWD,but it performs only three tones in monosyllabic form.Yangping and shangsheng have merged into the same tone which can be called as T2*.(2)The new and old LWD group perform consistently in general except some slight differences.Firstly,although yinping of two groups is a middle or low tone,the pitch value of new LWD is mostly 211 or 312 while that of the opposite group is recorded as 322 or 224.Furthermore,T2*of new LWD is a middle-rising tone and the value can be marked as 34 or 25 while the outcome of old group is a high-rising tone which drops slightly at the end with the value 454 or 354.Most importantly,we find that the degree of merge of yanging and shangsheng for the old LWD is higher than that of the opposite group.Finally,qusheng,a high-falling tone,is relatively stable and its pitch value can be recorded as 51 or 41.As for the study on tonal modifications in disyllabic sequences,the author reports that:(1)There is no obvious difference between the new LWD and old LWD.(2)Tone-sandhi will both occur in the first syllable and the second one.When T1 is followed by another T1 or T4,it would change into T2*.T2 and T3 would switch into a new tone with the value of 33 when they occur after T2.(3)T2*,a merged tone in the citation form,can still be distinguished in disyllabic sequences.To be specific,T3 changes into a middle or low tone with the value 33 or 22 when it is followed by T2 while T2 never underdoes any changes under the same circumstance.From this perspective,it can be inferred that there are still four tones for LWD and it is T3(shangsheng)that merge into T2(yangping)in citation form.The final part is the conclusion in which main findings in this study and some limitations as well as personal suggestions for future research have been presented.