An Analysis Of A Phonetic Experiment Of Tone Sandi In Huainan Dialect

Like many other tone languages,Chinese tone has played a very important role in people's utterance.Thus,more and more linguists have paid attention to Chinese tone,especially tone sandhi which is one significantly inevitable part in Mandarin.Huainan dialect is one of the dialects that shares a lot of similarities with Standard Mandarin.Huainan dialect,which belongs to Central Area Mandarin of north Anhui Province,remains a less studied area in the study on tone sandhi.Recent studies have all found out that there are four monosyllabic tones except neutral tone(qingsheng)in Huainan dialect: yinping(T1),yangping(T2),shangsheng(T3)and qusheng(T4),which is similar to Standard Mandarin due to the disappearance of rushing(checked syllable).For the purpose of explaining tone sandhi in Huainan dialect,this thesis aims to find out the acoustic features and phonological representations of tone sandhi in disyllabic sequences targeting a wider range of native speakers of different age groups,which will contribute to the better understanding of phonological knowledge of Huainan dialect.This thesis focuses on the study of the rules of disyllabic tone sandhi in Huainan dialect and also on the study of the contrast of tone sandhi between the local people aging from the young and the middle-aged to the old.The study has adopted the methodology of experimental phonetics to explore the acoustic features of tone sandhi in disyllabic sequences basically under the theoretical framework of generative phonology.A phonetic experiment is conducted to find out the phonetic implementations and phonological features of tone sandhi through observation and analysis.In addition,the data of the thesis is analyzed with Praat.According to the phonetic experiment,the four tones of Huainan dialect analyzed from monosyllabic words are marked with pitch values: T1: 212/22,T2: 44,T3: 24 and T4: 52/51.Through the phonetic analysis,this study has found out four distinctive tone sandhi patterns:T1 +T1 ? T3+T1T3+T2 ? T1+T2T3+T3 ? T2+T3T3+T4 ? T1+T4T1 changes into a rising tone similar to T3 when followed by another T1.T3 changes from a rising tone to a high-pitch level tone similar to T2 when followed by another T3.T3 changes to a low-pitch level tone similar to T1 when followed by T2 and T4.When T1 combines other tones,it will become 21 with the disappearing of the final pitch value.The thesis continues to explore the tone sandhi patterns from the aspect of age ranging from the young to the old to find out the differences between different age groups.By means of observation and analysis,the thesis has found out five tone sandhi patterns that are less stable with more possibilities: T1+T2,T2+T2,T2+T3,T2+T4 and T3+T2.When T2 is combined with other tones,it will change from a high-pitch level tone into a lower pitch rising tone similar to T3 in Huainan dialect.Among the differences,the tone sandhi patterns of the middle-aged and the old are relatively stable and they are close to the traditional sandhi patterns in Huainan dialect.While the sandhi patterns of the young are relatively changeable which embody the sandhi patterns of local Mandarin combining Mandarin with the dialect.This finding fills the vacancy in the research of Huainan dialect,casting some light on understanding tone sandhi in other Chinese dialects.