Title

Changting Hakka Tone Sandhi

Author

Hui-shan Lin

Genre

Article  

Pages

175-225

Download

PDF

Language

Chinese

Key words

Changting tone sandhi, bi-tonal sequences, tri tonal strings, rule application directionalities, optimality theory

Abstract

   A review of the existing literature on Changting tone sandhi reveals some important points worthy of attention. Descriptively, though fieldwork has been conducted on Changting tone sandhi, no consensus has yet been reached concerning which tonal combinations are subject to undergo tonal changes. Theoretically, though some researchers have attempted to provide analyses to account for the notorious directionality issue in tri-tonal sandhi, no promising analyses have yet been produced. In this study, the author conducted fieldwork to collect mono-tonal, bi-tonal and tri-tonal data of Changting to clarify the tone sandhi phenomenon and to propose analysis of the collected tone sandhi data. After collecting and comparing our collected data with those in the existing literature, the author found this study's observation of tone sandhi is richer than those reported in the existing literature. Two additional tonal changes which had not yet been reported are observed in this study's data. In analyzing bi-tonal sandhi, the author discovered that tonal changes in Changting are triggered by the tendency for tonemes to agree in intersyllabic position. They are accounted for by five OT constraints. As for tri-tonal sandhi, we propose three additional constraints that successfully predict the directionality in Changting tri-tonal sandhi.