Title: A comparative study of Tone 4 sandhi in Standard Mandarin and Luoyang Dialect
Abstract:This thesis provides a comparison of tone sandhi patterns in Standard Mandarin and
Luoyang Dialect, focusing on Tone 4 sandhi. Standard Mandarin is an official language
promoted in China in the 1930...This thesis provides a comparison of tone sandhi patterns in Standard Mandarin and
Luoyang Dialect, focusing on Tone 4 sandhi. Standard Mandarin is an official language
promoted in China in the 1930s, which is based on the Beijing Dialect by adopting its
syntactic, lexical and phonological systems, and taking some vocabulary from other
Northern dialects. Luoyang Dialect is a dialect spoken in Luoyang and its adjacent areas.
Both the Beijing Dialect and the Luoyang Dialect belong to the Northern Dialect Group.
There are four tones both in Standard Mandarin and Luoyang Dialect, and each tone is oneto-
one correlated, which indicates that a word marked as Tone 1 in one dialect will also be
Tone 1 in another. Tone 4 in both dialects follows a high falling tendency.
As an official language, Standard Mandarin has been extensively studied by linguists.
It has been documented that bu (‘no, not’), as a Tone 4 word in Standard Mandarin, will
dissimilate when it’s followed by other Tone 4 words. This thesis will re-examine this
sandhi rule, and collect acoustic data to investigate whether bu- sandhi exists in Luoyang
Dialect and whether other Tone 4 words also go through tone dissimilation as well. In order
to conduct this research, data was collected from four speakers, including two Standard
Mandarin speakers and two Luoyang Dialect speakers. Praat was used to collect the data
and extract pitch lists. In addition, an algorithm proposed by Shi (Shi & Wang, 2006) was
used to convert pitch data to Chao digits, allowing the tone value of each word to be further
compared.
My data confirms the existence of bu- sandhi in Standard Mandarin, and the
observation that bu is the only Tone 4 word in Standard Mandarin that goes through tone
dissimilation. In comparison with Standard Mandarin, my data shows that bu not only
dissimilates in front of Tone 4 words in Luoyang Dialect, but also will be neutralized from
a high falling tone into a level tone elsewhere. Additionally, different from Standard
Mandarin, other Tone 4 words in Luoyang Dialect will also dissimilate in front of Tone 4
words.
This thesis contributes to the phonological study of the Luoyang Dialect, and may have
implications for studies of the diachronic evolution of Luoyang Dialect, as well as the historical relationship between Beijing Dialect and Luoyang Dialect. This study is the first
to carry out a comparison between Standard Mandarin and Luoyang Dialect from the
perspective of tone 4 sandhi. Not only will a tone 4 sandhi rule in Luoyang Dialect be
proposed and added to the body of research on Chinese tone sandhi, but the relationship of
tone sandhi with stress, duration and the OCP will also be discussed.Read More
Publication Year: 2018
Publication Date: 2018-05-01
Language: en
Type: dissertation
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Cited By Count: 1
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