Contour-tone spreading and tone sandhi in Danyang Chinese

Abstract

An important contribution to our knowledge of tone sandhi among the Chinese dialects is Lü's (1980) article on the tones and tone sandhi behaviour of Danyang, a Wu dialect of Chinese. Lü's 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.

A directional asymmetry in Chinese tone sandhi systems

“…Tone extension for both left-dominant and right-dominant sandhis is found in Danyang (Lu¨(1980), Chan (1991Chan ( , 1995), a Wu dialect spoken in Jiangsu. There are six tonal melodies in Danyang polysyllabic words with a right-branching structure, as shown in (17) (taken from Chan (1995)).…”

“…Yip (1989) argued that it can be derived by edge associations of 42 and 24 and subsequent spreading of the initial 42 rightward as a unit. Bao (1990) and Chan (1991) both argued that the 42s are derived from 24s that result from the spreading of a unit 24 rightward. All these accounts rely on the theoretical notion of ''contour tone unit'' in phonological representation.…”

Some remarks on Contour Tone Units

“…Thus, Chan's bidirectional mapping approach is less convincing. For the above reasons, I conclude that even though the analysis in Chan (1991Chan ( , 1995 improves upon Chen (1986) and Yip (1989), it allows other problems to emerge from the atypical bidirectional mapping.…”

“…Previous analyses of contour tone spreading in Danyang (i.e., 18c) include Bao (1999), Chan (1991Chan ( , 1995, Chen (1986), and Yip (1989). Their derivations not only differ from each other; they also feature significant analytical problems, respectively.…”

“…The next step is to replicate an advantage of Chan's (1991Chan's ( , 1995 analysis, which is the non-cyclic application of tonal metathesis from 24 to 42 by a sequential process of contour formation and simplification. To this end, I suggest another phonetically based substitute.…”