Study On Tone Sandhi Of Tongli Dialect In Wujiang

The complex tone sandhi of Suzhou dialect,which is the focus of dialect phonetic research,has always attracted the attention of many scholars.Tongli is located on the outskirts of Suzhou,and its dialect has a unique phenomenon called tonal split according aspiration which Suzhou dialect does not have.In the past,the research on Tongli dialect mostly focused on the merging of its aspirated tone in monosyllable,while the research on its tone sandhi is almost blank and lacks detailed dialect materials.On the basis of in-depth field investigation,this thesis describes the tone sandhi of disyllabic units and trisyllabic units in detail with the tone categories in ancient Chinese phonology and grammatical construction being taken into account.The similarities and differences between the tone sandhi of Tongli dialect and Suzhou dialect are also discussed.On this basis,we try to summarize the type of tone sandhi in Tongli dialect and explore the relationship between tone sandhi and stress with the method of acoustic experiments.In disyllabic units,the first syllable tends to be consistent with its monosyllable tone.A small number of units change the tone of its first syllable.It can be concluded as:yinqu→yinping,yangqu→yangping.In general,the tone sandhi contour can be regarded as the tonal spread of the first syllable,forming a tonal spreading sandhi pattern.Based on this,each sandhi pattern can be named with the monosyllable tone name.It is found that pattern yinping,pattern yangping,pattern yinqu are dominant sandhi patterns,and they can transfer to other non-dominant sandhi patterns like pattern yangqu and pattern shangsheng.The transfer is restricted by yin and yang register.Compared with the tonal pattern of Shanghai dialect,the direction of transfer is closely related to the merging trend of monosyllable tones.In addition,the development of monosyllable tones and disyllable tones are not completely synchronous.For example,ciqingqu,which has been calssified as guzhuoqu in monosyllable tone,shares more similarities with quanqingqu in tone sandhi behavior.Through comparative research,the differences between the disyllable tone sandhi of Tongli dialect and Suzhou dialect exist in three aspects,including the direction and restrictions of tone sandhi transfer,the sandhi behavior of units starting with rusheng and the sandhi behavior of quantitative phrases.This thesis mainly defines two types of tone sandhi in phonetic forms: phonological word sandhi and non-phonological word sanhi.Trisyllabic phonological word sandhi is an extension of disyllable tone sanhi patterns,so the discussion of trisyllable tone sandhi is more focused on non-phonological words.It is found that nonphonological words mainly appear in subject-predicate construction and predicateobject construction with no specialization in meaning,low frequency of use,and no dialect characteristic vocabulary.Other consturctions that can adopt non-phonological word sandhi include some verb-complement,numerical-quantifier-noun,VVC,and AAB-type overlapping state adjectives.Finally,on the basis of tone sandhi behavior in disyllables and trisyllables,the type of tone sandhi in Tongli dialect can be summarized as prosody tone sandhi,which contains the influence of the left-dominant prosodic structure.By means of acoustic experiments,the F0 contour and the statistics of tonal length are presented.it is found that left-dominant prosody is not completely manifested as the highlight of pitch or duration,but in the form of tonal integrity.The tone sandhi of Tongli dialect is a phenomenon of tonal spreading under the influence of internal left-dominant prosody.The scope of spreading is bounded by phonological word and cannot cross the boundary,and pitch spreading and feature spreading are the two main ways.