Marjorie K. M. Chan

Wuxi tone sandhi from last to first syllable dominance

Abstract Wuxi is a Northern Wu dialect of Chinese spoken in Wuxi district, the administrative center of which is Wuxi City, located about thirty miles northwest of Suzhou, and another fifty miles further from Shanghai. The Wuxi dialect exhibits some interesting behaviour with respect to its tone sandhi patterning that has not been reported in the literature. [1] The dialect has two strategies for tone sandhi patterning — pattern extension and pattern substitution — both of which involve the first syllable as “dominant”, as determining the tone patterning in the sandhi span (Yue-Hashimoto 1980). Pattern extension simply involves taking the tone melody that was on the first syllable and extending that pattern onto the entire tone sandhi span. Pattern substitution requires one additional step before the tone-spreading; namely, the replacement of the tone melody on the first syllable with a new melody before its spread onto the tone sandhi domain.

Contour-tone spreading and tone sandhi in Danyang Chinese *

An important contribution to our knowledge of tone sandhi among the Chinese dialects is Lus (1980) article on the tones and tone sandhi behaviour of Danyang, a Wu dialect of Chinese. Lus description of Danyang is, to date, our only source on the dialect. While it is a northern Wu dialect, the tone sandhi patterning in Danyang differs from Shanghai, Suzhou, Wuxi and other dialects in the vicinity. There are a number of interesting problems related to tone in the dialect. This paper restricts the topic to only one of these problems, namely the treatment of the six basic tone patterns in Danyang, focusing in particular on the pattern in which a contour tone is copied Onto adjacent syllables in the tone sandhi domain.

“Post‐stopped nasals”: An acoustic investigation

In some dialects of Chinese and Miao, the nasals in syllable‐initial position have been described as being accompanied by a homorganic stop, which are often transcribed with superscripts: [mb], [nd], and [ŋg], as a deliberate attempt to characterize these segments as phonetically distinct from prenasalized stops, [mb], [nd], [ŋg]. In our study, the acoustic nature of these “post‐stopped” nasals will be explored, since no instrumental study has been conducted on them. A preliminary investigation of data from two Zhongshan Chinese speakers confirm that these nasals are different both perceptually and acoustically from the prenasalized stops in other languages. It is found that the so‐called “stop” component in Zhongshan syllable‐initial nasals is not a stop, but a burst that occurs simultaneous with the oral release following the nasal. Such bursts occur sporadically in English, but are consistently produced in the Zhongshan nasals, and are perceived as homorganic stops accompanying the nasals. The waveforms also show a characteristic shape, with a sharp rise in amplitude at vowel onset. The results suggest the precise synchronization of velic closure with oral release.

On the status of “basic” tones

Abstract In the traditional analysis of the tones in Chinese, a distinction is made between “basic tones” and “sandhi tones”. The former occurs on the citation tones of monosyllabic words and the latter on syllables that had undergone tone sandhi changes. Typically, tone sandhi positions are sites where tone neutralization had taken place, so that in a given dialect, the number of tones in citation context exceed those in sandhi context. As a result, the tones on citation forms are considered the “basic” tones. This paper challenges the traditional treatment of citation tones as the “basic” ones. In some dialects, there is an increase in tonal contrasts in tone sandhi environment. In such cases, the tone sandhi environment has preserved contrasts lost in citation context. Further complications in some dialects are presented here, providing the basis for making a three-way distinction among: (1) citation tone, (2) sandhi tone, and (3) basic (or underlying) tone. The basic, or underlying, tone may be coterm...