The Phonological System of A Xin\u27an Idiolect

My idiolect, a Xin’an idiolect, belongs to the Wuxi dialect, which is the northern Wu dialect. It carries most of the characteristics of the Wuxi dialect, such as the tripartite division of the manner of articulation of initial stop consonants. However, with the special geographic position, on the bounty of Wuxi dialect from the northwest area to southeast area and connected with Suzhou city, my idiolect shows its unique features, such as the condition of the retroflex. This study analyzes the phonological system of the idiolect and discusses the features. Since the dialect of the suburban area of the Wuxi is rare, it was only documented in the local chronicles; therefore the study is a good supplemental material to the Wuxi dialect. Moreover, using the idiolect is like to use the phonological material with the specific area and social identity. It is well known that the variation of the language is related to the area, to the speaker’s social identity and to the situation, therefore the specific idiolect definitely will benefit researchers to analyze the dialect. Furthermore, idiolect is also a good sample to study the language diversity among the different social classes, which need to get more attention from scholars. With the influence of the Mandarin and the surrounding dialects, some phonological features of my idiolect are in the variation, such as the sharp and rounded sounds. In the thesis, the theory of the language contact is applied to explain my idiolect

The productivity of tone sandhi patterns in Wuxi Chinese

The complex tone sandhi patterns of Chinese dialects present analytical challenges to theoretical phonology, and productivity tests can help us address the issue from another perspective. Previous studies have shown that sandhi productivity is negatively affected by phonological opacity, positively affected by clear phonetic motivations, and positively correlated with lexical frequency of the sandhi patterns. It is further argued that the phonological grammar of tone sandhi patterns includes both grammatical constraints and lexical listing. We complement this research endeavor with a sandhi pattern whose productivity has not been previously studied: pattern substitution in Wuxi Chinese. Pattern substitution in Wuxi is left-dominant, whereby the base tone of the first syllable is first replaced by another tone before being spread to the sandhi domain. As a first step towards understanding the productivity of the pattern, we focus on disyllabic combinations between the three Yin tones on non-checked syllables T1, T3, and T5. Twenty native Wuxi Chinese speakers produced four sets of stimuli, including one set of Actual-Occurring real words (AO-AO), two sets of novel words made up of Actual-Occurring morphemes (*AO-AO1, *AO-AO2), and one set of novel words composed of an Accidental-Gap syllable and an Actual-Occurring morpheme (AG-AO). The difference between *AO-AO1 and *AO-AO2 was that the first AO morpheme of *AO-AO1 occurs in the initial position of real disyllable words, while that of *AO-AO2 does not. Both acoustic and statistical analyses were conducted. The results show that speakers had no difficulty producing real words with the expected sandhi, but pattern substitution is not fully productive in novel words. AG-AO showed the lowest productivity, while there was no significant difference between *AO-AO1 and *AO-AO2. This indicates that speakers may have tonal allomorph listings for morphemes as well as for syllables of morphemes (*AO-AO2). When they could not find the syllables in real syllable listing (AG-AO), they tend to spread the base tone of the first syllable or do nothing. Moreover, T3 showed the highest substitution productivity, and the similarity between T3, a low rising tone, and its substitution, a high rising tone, is the highest. It suggests that speakers may rely more on phonetic similarity rather than lexical frequency in applying tone sandhi to novel words

Crosslinguistic trends in tone change A review of tone change studies in East and Southeast Asia

Ground-breaking studies on how Bangkok Thai tones have changed over the past 100 years (Pittayaporn 2007, 2018; Zhu et al. 2015) reveal a pattern that Zhu et al. (2015) term the “clockwise tone shift cycle:” low > falling > high level or rising-falling > rising > falling-rising or low. The present study addresses three follow-up questions: (1) Are tone changes like those seen in Bangkok Thai also attested in other languages? (2) What other tone changes are repeated across multiple languages? (3) What phonetic biases are most likely to be the origins of the reported changes? A typological review of 52 tone change studies across 45 Sinitic, Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien, and Tibeto-Burman languages reveals that clockwise changes are by far the most common. The paper concludes by exploring how tonal truncation (Xu 2017) generates synchronic variation that matches the diachronic patterns; this suggests that truncation is a key mechanism in tone change

The nature of variation in tone sandhi patterns of Shanghai and Wuxi Wu

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 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

Bilingual Frequency in a Favorable Context (BFFC) in the Italian dialectal area. Theoretical preliminaries to the analysis of geminate lateral retroflexion and voiceless plosives aspiration in Antona (MS)

The paper builds a theoretical framework for the application of the Bilingual Frequency in Favorable Context (BFFC) formula to the peculiar Italian linguistic setting. BFFC was first devised as a usage-based tool to weight the frequency effect of non-varying cognate words against the probability of variation phenomena in bilingual settings. Since Italian dialects are sister languages of the standard variety, speakers can be considered bilingual. However, no dialectal frequency corpora for the extraction of essential BFFC components are available. The paper suggests overcoming this hurdle using subjective frequency estimates and testing BFFC effectiveness through a picture-naming task and acceptability ratings. A critical overview of the phonetic features of interest is also presented, advancing proposals for future analyses

Moraic Footing in Suzhou Chinese: Evidence from Toneless Moras

The current study provides additional phonetic data for the light-initial sandhi patterns in Suzhou Chinese, illustrating a context-sensitive pitch alternation that is not present after heavy-initial forms, and has not been attested in other neighboring Northern Wu varieties either. I propose that such pitch alternation is due to interpolation effects on toneless prosodic constituents, here toneless moras. A binary trochee built directly on moras yields an unparsed (i.e. toneless) final mora in light-heavy disyllables, accounting for the pitch patterns on the surface. Such an analysis is not only empirically adequate, but also echoes the cross-linguistic structural observation that a foot head lighter in weight than the dependent is generally dispreferred (Head-Dependent Asymmetry; cf. Dresher and van der Hulst 1998)

Lack of Prosodic Focus in Chongqing Dialect and Possible Historical Sources

This study investigates Chongqing Dialect, a language largely used in Southwest China which is mutually intelligible to Beijing Mandarin speakers. Phonetic variations triggered by focus in Chongqing Dialect, especially in the form of post-focus compression (PFC), are investigated in terms of max F0, mean F0, duration and intensity. A follow-up perception test is also conducted. The production experiment shows that there are no significant changes from no focus condition to focus condition in the factors analysed, and no PFC is observed in Chongqing Dialect. The perception test shows a rather low identification rate at around 40%. The results of this study support the hypothesis that there is a typological divide within the Chinese languages, and the reason is explored by an analysis of the historical roots of Chongqing Dialect. As a representative of Southwest Mandarin, the lack of PFC in Chongqing Dialect suggests that many other Southwest Mandarin dialects also may not have PFC

Prosodic focus in three northern Wu dialects: Wuxi, Suzhou and Ningbo

The present study investigated three northern Wu dialects: Wuxi, Suzhou, and Ningbo. It is found that, in all three dialects, focus is encoded by increasing the maximum F0 and duration of focused words, and lowering and compressing the F0 and pitch range of post-focus words. These results are consistent with previous findings about Wu dialect in Shanghai. Northern Wu dialects therefore seem to encode focus in a similar way to Beijing Mandarin, but different from many languages/dialects spoken in southern China. This finding, together with evidence from gene studies and migration history of Wu areas, provide further support for the inheritance hypothesis of PFC, according to which all languages with PFC are descendants of a common proto-language in the Middle East