Tone Changes And Prosodic Hierarchy In Badong Dialect Of Hubei Province

Based on field investigations,this paper uses theories and methods such as Chinese Nonlinear Phonology and Chinese Prosodic Syntax to study the tone changes and prosodic hierarchy and characteristics of Badong dialect from a synchronic perspective.In the tone survey of tone combinations,the tone combinations of two-character group,three-character group,four-character group and above were investigated.All dialect examples are marked with international phonetic symbols.After investigation,it is found that the two-character group with no soft tones and two-character group with soft tones show different tone sandhi rules,but they both have two types of tone changes:phonetic changes and phonological changes,and they both have intonation pattern language phenomena.The three-character group includes two types of tone changes:combination using two-character tonal rules and non-combination different from the two-character tonal rules,and they both have intonation pattern language phenomena;Four or more characters group include have three types of tone change patterns:the combination of two-character and three-character tonal rules,tone expansion and tone reduction,and they all have intonation pattern language phenomena.In order to present the tone change rules of Badong dialect more intuitively,this article summarizes the tone change rules of each two-character group and three-character group in tables,and explains the characteristics of each category.This part of study laid the foundation for the prosodic hierarchy analysis below.In terms of prosodic hierarchy analysis,using the theory of Chinese non-linear phonology,learning from the Chinese prosodic hierarchy system it proposed based on Mandarin,according to the tone changes phenomena and rules in the Badong dialect,this paper divides three main prosodic hierarchies of the Pitch,Pause and Intonation,and analyzes the characteristics of each hierarchy.In order to explain the characteristics of the prosodic hierarchy of Badong dialect more deeply,this paper also compares the prosodic hierarchy of Badong dialect with the the prosodic hierarchy of Mandarin.Many conclusions different from Mandarin are drawn tone,for example,the step and tone domain show correspondence.The rhythm pattern of the step is "one,two,three are regular and one,three are restricted,four and five are rare and followed by a soft voice".The sentence pattern of interrogative sentence with interrogative particles,all alternative interrogative sentence,exclamatory sentence without an interjection at the end of the sentence and all imperative sentence remain basically unchanged.In addition,this article also uses theories of Chinese non-linear phonology to explain the tone changes in Badong dialect,and finds that tone extension rules,misaligned connection rules,prosodic restriction,floating tone and default tones are main reasons for the tone changes of Badong dialect.