The Nature of Variation in Tone Sandhi Patterns of Shanghai and Wuxi Wu

Abstract

The primary goal of this dissertation is to understand the variation patterns in suprasegmental processes and what factors influence the patterns. To answer the questions, we investigated the variation patterns of tone sandhi in the Shanghai and Wuxi Wu dialects of Chinese.Shanghai disyllables and trisyllables have been documented to have two different sandhi patterns: tonal extension and tonal reduction. Some items can only undergo tonal extension, some items can only undergo tonal reduction, and some can variably undergo either type of sandhi. Previous works have indicated that the syntactic structure, semantic transparency, and lexical frequency of the items all play a role in the sandhi application.Additionally, the morpheme length of trisyllabic items (1+2, 2+1) is also expected to affect their sandhi application.A variant forms' goodness rating experiment, together with a lexical frequency rating experiment and a semantic transparency rating experiment, showed that syntactic structure has a primary effect on sandhi application in general. It overrides the effect of semantic transparency, especially in modifier-noun items. The nature of the lexical frequency effect in Shanghai is related to the syntactic structure of the lexical item. Morpheme length effect is not found.Wuxi disyllables and trisyllables also have been observed to have two different sandhi patterns: tonal substitution and no sandhi. Some items can only apply tonal substitution, and some can apply either form variably. Syntactic structure and semantic transparency have been iv reported to affect Wuxi sandhi application, and morpheme length is also expected to have an effect in trisyllabic sandhi application.The three rating experiments conducted in Wuxi found that due to the lexical listedness of the opaque substitution pattern, frequency influences both modifier-noun and verb-noun positively, although modifier-noun prefers tonal substitution form more. Semantic transparency effect is only apparent for verb-noun disyllables. Moreover, morpheme length also distinguishes sandhi application between 1+2 and 2+1 modifier-noun items.In all, by using quantitative rating experiments, the present study shows that tone sandhi variation is regulated by both grammatical factors, such as syntactic structure, morpheme length, phonological opacity, and nongrammatical factors, such as lexical frequency.v

The representation of variable tone sandhi patterns in Shanghai Wu

“…For example, when /tsʰɔ24 vɛ13/ 'to fry + rice' means 'fried rice' as a compound noun, it can only undergo extension sandhi [tsʰɔ33 vɛ44]; when it means 'to fry rice' as a verb phrase, it can undergo extension sandhi or tonal reduction [tsʰɔ44 vɛ13]. Yan (2018) further investigated the factors that influence the variation pattern of disyllabic tone sandhi in Shanghai. The study reported a goodness rating experiment for the variant forms with native Shanghai speakers in tandem with semantic transparency and subjective frequency ratings from the same speakers.…”

“…Shanghai tone sandhi has been reported to have two different patterns-tonal extension or tonal reduction-depending on the properties of syntactic structure, semantic transparency, and usage frequency: Some lexical items can only undergo tonal extension, some can only undergo tonal reduction, and some can have both forms (Xu, Tang, & Qian, 1981, 1982Yan, 2018). Not only will the phonological alternation, in this case, tone sandhi, lead to a mismatch between surface and stored representations (Chien, Sereno, & Zhang, 2016;Nixon, Chen, & Schiller, 2015), but the variation pattern may also make the recognition process more challenging.…”

Directionality of Disyllabic Tone Sandhi across Chinese Dialects is Conditioned by Phonetically-Grounded Structural Simplicity

“…Whereas rightdominant sandhi applies to loosely connected words or phrases (verb-object, subject-verb, verb-modifier, and coordinated structures). For example, when 头痛 means "headache" as a compound, left-dominant sandhi is applied; when it means "(my) head aches" as a subject-predicate phrase, right-dominant sandhi is applied (Yan, 2016).…”

Using Nonce-probe Tests and Auditory Priming to Investigate Speakers' Phonological Knowledge of Tone Sandhi

“…Participants in the Shanghai experiment also provided production data for real and novel disyllabic words, but the novel disyllables were cued as modifier-noun combinations (M-Ns) instead of V-Ns, as V-Ns are generally phrases in Shanghai and do not participate in tone sandhi [5] [40]. All tonal combinations were tested in [39], but we only focus on the combinations between 51 and the two tones on nonchecked syllables with a voiceless onset (51,35) due to space limitation.…”

“…The same methods were used to elicit the production of both real and novel words in Wuxi, but the novel words included both M-N and V-N items, as no clear difference in sandhi production between the two has been documented (but see [40]). Twenty native speakers with a mean age of 27 participated in the experiment in Wuxi.…”