Description
- Abstract:
- Tone sandhi in Ganyu, a Mandarin dialect, is relatively complicated. There were only a few descriptive works in existing literature. By using prosodic structure, the thesis provides a uniform explanation to non-focused pitched syllable tone sandhi in Ganyu from the perspective of Optimality Theory. In the analysis, a syllable contains three pitch targets underlyingly, while in the output only two targets are allowed. Phonological phrase and foot are constructed via the ranking of phonosyntactic constraints. Pitch-sensitive constraints which are responsible for each and every sandhi phenomenon are motivated by tonal saliency, metrical integrity, target realizability, and pitch faithfulness. In addition, the thesis proposes a new concept: dependent pitch target. Phonologically-relevant creaky or falsetto sounds, as found in Ganyu and neighboring dialects, are dependent pitch targets which must follow a low or high target, and they are very short in duration. The analysis covers disyllabic and trisyllabic feet both at the final position of a phonological phrase and at the non-final position. The analysis can be extended to cases which involve focus-stressed syllables and pitch-less syllables in future investigations.
- Notes:
- Thesis (A. M.)--Brown University, 2018
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Citation
Gu, Yiming,
"Tone Sandhi in Ganyu Mandarin"
(2018).
Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/wb7a-wb82
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Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences department....