On The Grammatical Tone Sandhi In Hengshan Dialect

As an isolated language,Chinese is not morphologically rich like Indo-European languages,but in some Chinese dialects,tonal changes always work like morphological changes,that is,to express certain vocabulary and grammatical meanings.This dissertation conducts a comprehensive and systematic investigation of tone sandhi that expresses vocabulary and grammatical meanings in Hengshan dialect,including three major categories:diminutive tone sandhi,personal pronoun tone sandhi and rhetorical tone sandhi.This research analyzes their conditions,functions and origination,and summarizes the characteristics and evolution trend of grammatical sandhi of Hengshan dialect.The thesis is made up of five chapters:The first chapter is the introduction.This part briefly introduces the geography,history and language usage of Hengshan County and describes the phonetic system of Hengshan dialect in detail.It introduces the current research status from two aspects:Hengshan dialect research and Chinese grammatical tone sandhi research,and then briefly describes the meaning,method and source of corpus of this research.The second chapter is about the diminutive tone sandhi of Hengshan dialect.This part describes three types of diminutive in Hengshan dialect,including suffix,reduplication and tone sandhi,and then analyzes the functional distribution of diminutive tone sandhi in Hengshan dialect,and then summarizes the tone sandhi patterns of disyllable words,and finally discusses the source of the diminutive tone sandhi in the Hengshan dialect from the perspective of the relationship between dimunutive tone sandhi and dimunutive suffix.The third chapter is about the personal tone sandhi of Hengshan dialect.This part summarizes the conditions of the tone sandhi of the personal pronouns in Hengshan dialect,including the syntactic position,the subject of possessive and number,and then describes other three kinds of possessive markers related to possesive expressions in addition to tone sandhi,and finally explores the origination of tone sandhi in personal pronouns.The fourth chapter is about the rhetorical tone sandhi of Hengshan dialect.This part describes the phonetic and syntactic characteristics of the rhetorical tone sandhi in Hengshan dialect,then summarizes the functions of the rhetorical tone sandhi in Hengshan dialect,and finally discusses its origination and trend of development in Hengshan dialect.The fifth chapter is the conclusion.This part summarizes the main perspectives of this research,and points out the innovations and shortcomings of this thesis,and proposes further research prospects.