A Study Of Tone Sandhi Typology In Yueyang From The Perspective Of Sociophonetics

Sociophonetics is the combination of variation sociolinguistics and experimental phonetics,which is a newly emerging field that has developed rapidly in recent years.It uses the method of experimental phonetics to study the phonetic variation,the relationship between the phonetic variations of phonological forms and the social and geographical factors,etc.Under the framework of sociophonetics,this thesis intends to explore the types of tone sandhi in Yueyang area,and predicts the evolutionary paths of tone sandhi types by virtue of the characteristics of their phonetic variations.Hence,the diachronic and synchronic studies on the phenomenon of tone sandhi in Yueyang Dialect can be unified and conducted simultaneously.With the method of experimental phonetics,and using the auditory phonetic analysis and the software PRAAT,this thesis,based on the data of disyllabic words from 30 native speakers who speak standard Yueyang dialect,extracts the relevant data of final syllable shape,duration and intensity from initial syllable category and final syllable category.And using the social science statistical software SPSS 22.0 for multivariate analysis of variance to analyze the factors that may affect tone sandhi.These factors are taken from four areas:(i)interaction between phonology and phonetics of tone sandhi;(ii)interaction between metrical phonology and tonal phonology;(iii)tone sandhi typology;(iv)sociolinguistics and its relation with historical linguistics.The experimental results show that the tone sandhi types of disyllabic words in Yueyang area are "transitional" in the sense that they continue to evolve toward more radical metrically controlled types after finishing changing from the categorical alternation types to the metrical types.Statistical analyses show that tones’ intrinsic prominence,a phonetic factor,can counterattack the metrical structure and make the position of tone sandhi swing from one edge to another.How phonetic prominence swings the metrical structure will be reflected on the phonetic characteristics of the second syllables.The varying degrees of the swinging effects observed in different age groups in different dialects constitute an ordered sequence,which correspond to the differences in the degrees of conservativeness of different age groups in different dialects.In the multivariate analysis of variance,the three independent variables of the initial syllable category,the final syllable category and the final syllable shape have different degrees of influence on the final syllable duration and the final syllable intensity.In addition,compared with the young group,the phonology of old group is more conservative,and the tone sandhi type is closer to the tone-category-alternation type;whereas the phonology of young group is more radical,the tone sandhi is closer to the metrically-determined type.When comparing the three dialects in Yueyang,the phonology of Rongjiawan is more conservative than that of Taolin and yanglousi.In fact,this result can be seen as early as Rongjiawan’s citation tone phonology—rusheng is still divided into yinru and yangru.A synchronic and diachronic study of the tone sandhi of disyllabic words is given,which proves that sociophonetics can successfully analyze the type and evolutionary trend of tone sandhi.In addition,the phenomenon of tone sandhi and its summary are of great significance to the study of Chinese tone sandhi typology.