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Tone Sandhi in Huangyan Wu
Tone Sandhi in Huangyan Wu
Tone alternations: Sandhi sytems in contact
Field work: Huangyan, an understudied Sinitic Wu dialect, shows mixed patterns for tone alternations/sandhi. The final tone remains intact and the initial tone changes for most disyllabic words (50%), but there are exceptions. [abstract]
Praat & Tone distribution: (1) [±smooth] feature is proposed to capture four falling tones in the tonal inventory. (2) Contour slope (smooth vs. sharp) and movement (fall vs. non-fall) predict tonal behaviors. Smoothness is targeted by sandhi rules and also conditions sandhi rules. [manuscript] [poster]
Figure 1. Tonal inventory: Slope feature [±smooth] for tonal distinction
Figure 2. Contours are lost for smooth tones (A/C), not sharp tones (B/D); Falling tones (A/B) are sensitive to adjacent tones, non-falling tones (C/D) are not
Tone Processing
Tone Processing
Online processing of tones & tonal rules
Word recognition (in prep): Do speakers use slope (smooth vs. sharp) of tonal contours to recognize monosyllabic words in real time?
Wug test (in prep): Are the rules for these tonal variations psychologically real among speakers? Do speakers memorize lexical items case by case or make generalizations based on abstract tonal categories?
One fun fact about Huangyan Wu
You can produce a string of five syllabic nasals for a sentence (no vowels).
[n31 n̤21 ŋ13 m13 n̤21]
It means 'your son's fish doesn't have a son'.
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