An OT Analysis Of Tone Sandhi Of Disyllabic Sequences In Suining Dialect

This thesis strives to offer a phonological analysis of disyllabic tone sandhi in Southwest Mandarin in Suining,Sichuan Province.Previous studies collected the acoustic data of the citation tones and disyllabic tone sandhi forms in Suining based on auditory impression,while this thesis investigates the phonetic realizations of tonal inventories in Suining through the methodology of experimental phonetics.A tonal representation model is established based on the data collected from the phonetic experiment.Then the sandhi representations are put under scrutiny within the framework of Optimality Theory.The present thesis observes that there are four citation tones in Suining,with their tonal representations being MH,ML,HL,and LM.As to the disyllabic tone sandhi forms,six patterns are generalized.Based on the collected data,tone sandhi in Suining implies a minor tendency of right prominence in disyllabic sequences.Within the framework of OT,seven constraints are formulated to account for the tone sandhi patterns in Suining as below.^*R_ISE]#,^*#[F_ALL>>^*P_OLAR>>I_DENT-IO-T_ONE>>^*XY.X>>OCP’>>^*X.YXUnder the evaluation of the constraint hierarchy as proposed above,the 16 possible combination of tone sandhi in Suining are a result of the hierarchical ranking of the foregoing seven constraints,namely,a result of interaction between the markedness constraints characterized by OCP’and the faithfulness constraints characterized by I_DENT-IO-T_ONE.This thesis strictly follows the academic norms of phonetic experiments and optimality theoretic phonological analysis.It provides the phonetic data of monosyllabic tones and disyllabic tones of Suining dialect of Southwest Mandarin,as well as an optimality theoretic analysis of the tonal sandhi in disyllabic sequences from the perspective of phonology.