Duration Properties and Contrast Preservation in Taifeng Tone Sandhi
Xiaoyan Zhang, Aijun Li, Zhiqiang Li · 2023
Most tone sandhi in Chinese Wu dialects is characterized as preservation of tones on the stressed syllable and neutralization of tonal contrast on unstressed syllables. In many analyses, this phonological process has been argued to correlate with metrical prominence within prosodic constituents. Prominent positions often entail extended duration to accommodate tonal contours unless they are associated with checked tones, which have inherently shorter durations compared to long tones. This study focuses on analyzing the duration properties of the right-headed structure in disyllabic tone sandhi patterns in Taifeng Chinese. The tonal inventory of Taifeng Chinese comprise three distinct long tones and a single short checked tone, differentiated by tonal duration and syllable structure. In the disyllabic verb-object combinations, the word-level stress falls on the object, resulting in a right-headed metrical prominence. In this paper, we present findings related to the durational patterns of tones in disyllabic tone sandhi and explore cases where conflicting durational properties of lexical tones and the metrical structure intersect. When dealing with disyllabic sequences of long tones, a substantial reduction of duration is observed in the initial syllable. This reduction is accompanied by the neutralization of tonal contrasts. Conversely, the final syllable retains a duration similar to that of its citation form, preserving its tonal contour. The short checked tone in Taifeng responds differently to the duration properties of the metrical structure. While the preservation of tonal contrasts prevents significant lengthening of checked tone syllables in the metrically strong position, a certain degree of lengthening is identified in two of the three groups of speakers studied. Across the three speaker groups categorized by region and age, the durational patterns exhibit a high degree of consistency. It is noteworthy that young speakers seem to display discernible patterns different from patterns used by older speakers.