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Article published In: Sound, Form, and Meaning of Chinese Dialects
Edited by Ik-sang Eom
[Language and Linguistics 20:1] 2019
► pp. 15–45

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The phonological status of Low tones in Shanghai tone sandhi

Default tones or boundary tones?

 | Kobe University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 2 January 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00028.tak
Abstract
In Shanghai tone sandhi, with the exception of T5 (yangru) sandhi, a pitch-fall occurs at the second or third syllable of a phonological word (or a sandhi domain). Previous analyses argue that this is invoked by the insertion of a default Low tone to satisfy the Well-formedness Condition of the autosegmental theory. However, in the framework of the present autosegmental theory, that condition is no longer necessarily satisfied, and an alternative interpretation, adopting a boundary Low tone, has been suggested. To evaluate the appropriateness of the default and boundary interpretations, we compared pitch contours among di- to tetrasyllabic words in greater detail. The results show that, in T1 to T4 sandhi, disyllabic words tend to have lower pitch contours than tri- and tetrasyllabic words at the first and second syllables, and that, in tetrasyllables, minimum pitch values were constantly attested at the third syllable. These results indicate that in Shanghai tone sandhi, a boundary Low tone is assigned at the right edge of a phonological word, and it is further associated with the third syllable in tetrasyllables. This boundary interpretation further gives an appropriate explanation of the difference of the pitch-fall between Middle and New Shanghai.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Phonetic realization of pitch-fall of Shanghai tone sandhi
    • 1.2Phonological problems of the pitch-fall pattern of Shanghai tone sandhi
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Speech materials
    • 2.2Subjects
    • 2.3Procedures
    • 2.4Measurements and normalization
  • 3.Results and analysis
    • 3.1T1–T4 sandhi
    • 3.2T5 sandhi
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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