The Tone Sandhi Of Liutun Vernacular In Guide County Of Qinghai Province

This paper mainly described the tone sandhi system of Liutunhua (Liutun vernacular) in Guide County of Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai Province, focused on the tone sandhi of disyllabic units and trisyllabic units.Same like Chinese dialects in the region of Gansu and Qinghai provinces, typically represented by Hezhou dialect and Xining dialect, the synchronic structure system of Liutunhua displays evident characters of language contact, especially reflected in grammar. But, from the perspective of phonology, lexical, cultural identity and so on, this paper still regarded it as a Chinese dialect.This paper selected tone sandhi of suprasegmental level as the research objects and mainly focused on description. The main contents in each chapter and section are in following:The introduction chapter mainly introduced the general situation of history, geography and humanity of the fieldwork location and accounted for the information of informants and the source of linguistic data. It briefly described the system of initials and rimes of Liutunhua. Moreover, it generalized two surface syllabic citation tone categories and summarized the corresponding relation between them and tone categories in ancient Chinese phonology. Especially, the second section highlighted that the discussion regarding to the problems between stress and tone among Chinese dialects and other languages was always the hot and difficult points in academic research. It also pointed out that it would be materially and theoretically significant to research the tone sandhi system of Liutunhua.The second to the fourth chapters is the core part of the article, which described the tone sandhi of disyllabic units and trisyllabic units in detail. We firstly paid attention to distinguish the strata of tone sandhi and defined three types of tone sandhi in phonetic forms:phonological word(for short PhWd)sandhi, non PhWd-sandi, and first-syllable prominence sandhi. In description, first two types were focal objects in our analysis and we paid the close attention to two issues:the relation between PhWd sandhi and syllabic citation tones, and the relation between tone sandhi and grammatical and semantic elements.From the description of tone sandhi of disyllabic units, we found that there was a overlapped and interlaced relationship between the (non) PhWd-sandhi and the grammatical units of different levels. Under this comprehension, making use of the rules by which the syllabic citation tones control the PhWd-sandhi, we concluded that the tone of qusheng firstly was a dominant tone category, and so was the tone of yangping(including the voiced rusheng in ancient Chinese phonology).Both of them can determine the whole disyllabic tone sandhi forms under certain conditions. We also inferred that there would be four syllabic citation tones in the underlying level for Liutunhua, and we specially distinguished a kind of "B-type words" whose surface tone sandhi forms were not stable.The tone sandhi of trisyllabic units is by far more complicated than that of disyllabic units. An important aspect is that the constraining conditions of PhWd-tone-sandhi are not only related to syllabic citation tone, but also to the hierarchy of grammatical structures within the polysyllabic units and to the prosodic property of monosyllables, etc. However, as far as restricted by the inadequacy of data, we can only give a narrowly conditioned rule of PhWd-sandhi at present, but we concluded the problems which needed to be researched in the future. In addition to this, we tried to found a method for defining the underlying tone sandhi forms of "B-type words", in terms of the close relationship between the disyllabic and trisyllabic PhWd-sandhi. Besides, the second and third chapter both simply discussed the "first-syllable prominence tone sandhi", but not discussed it deeply. The forth chapter discussed the tone sandhi of the units in "er"-retroflection and reduplication.The conclusion chapter summarized the rules and problems proposed in previous chapters.