An Experimental Study of Tone and Tone Sandhi in the New School of Nanjing Dialect

夏心悅

（天津師范大學，天津300387）

Abstract：The tone and tone sandhi of Nanjing dialect has always been concerned by scholars.However,most of the subjects of previous studies lived in the north of the city or were old.Through the analysis of the pronunciation of the young people in the south of the city,this paper attempts to have a further understanding of the tone and tone sandhi of Nanjing dialect.

Key words：tone and tone sandhi,Nanjing dialect,experimental study

一、Introduction

Nanjing dialect was affected by the city's historically diverse jurisdiction and large population.And the inner difference of Nanjing dialect is quite big.

It is easy to find that many studies have been done to research the tone and tone sandhi of Nanjing dialect.Ma (2009)found that the difference of tone sandhis between old and new Nanjing dialect is mainly in the tone domain level.Ma and Li (2014)found the tone variation of three-character formation in Nanjing dialect has nothing to do with its internal structure and word nature.The three-character formation of Nanjing dialect is dominated by right-tone-changing.

The phonetic studiesin Nanjing dialect are relatively comprehensive.But most of their subjects were middle-aged and old people in the south or people in the north.Therefore,this study tries to do some analysis on the two-character continuous tone sandhi of the new School of Nanjing dialect in the south of the city,trying to find out whether the tone of young people in the South of the city is affected by the widespread popularization of Mandarin education.

二、Experimental design

1.Subjects

There are two subjects for this experiment.

Subject A is a female,27 years old.She has been living in Qinhuai District until today.

Subject B is a female,23 years old.She has been living in Yuhuatai District,which is also southern area in Nanjing,for 23 years.

Both of the two subjects can speak Nanjing dialect and they have received mandarin education.

2.Equipment

(1)Recording equipment:Dell xps13 desktop.

(2)Data processing software: Praat5.4.06; Microsoft Excel 2007.

(3)Words table: Two tables are used. One is one-character table containing five tones in Nanjing dialect.Another table contains five big groups of two-character words which are divided according to the tones of their preceding characters.Each big group is divided into five small groups according to the tones of their second characters.Each small group has 8 words,so 200 words are tested.

三、Experimental procedure and results

Praat was used to record.Afterwards,we organize the data in Excel, calculate the value of the five-letter system and draw charts.

As this study aims to explore the tone sandhi of the two-character words in Nanjing dialect,the T values of the F0 of the five citation tones have been done first.Based on that the pitch value of the five citation tones can be generalized as table 1 as followed:

Table 1

From the table we can see that T1 is a falling tone,T2 is a rising tone,T3 is a falling tone,T4 is a falling tone and T5 is a level tone.

Then,the F0 contours of two-character words are shown as below:

Figure 1.T values:T1+Tx

From Figure 1 we can get some results.Except for T1+T1,the other four groups of front characters have the same trend of falling tone with their citation tones.But T1+T4 and T1+T5 have changed their front tone range to 43 and 42,respectively.The front of T1+T1 becomes 33 as a level tone.For the later characters,only T5 changed from 55 flat to 34 as a rising tone.

Figure 2 T values:T2+Tx

Figure 2 shows the T values of T2+Tx.T2 before T1 becomes 323.But the falling part is not obvious.T2 before T5 becomes 32.About the later characters,T2 goes to 324,T3 stays the same contour,but the range changes from 31 to 42,T4becomes to 33,T5changes to a rising tone 45.

Figure 3 T values:T3+Tx

Figure 3 shows the T values of T3+Tx.The preceding characters of T3+T3 have changed from 31 to 34.The preceding tone of the other four groups is still falling,but all of them have changed from 31 to 32.The second character T1,T2,T3 and T5 have kept their contour.Their ranges have changed.Besides,T4 becomes 22 as a level tone.

Figure 4 T values:T4+Tx

Figure 4 is about the T values of T4+Tx.Generally speaking,the trend of the preceding character is falling.However,in group T4+T1,the preceding character is a level tone 44.And in T4+T4,the preceding character is a level tone 33.The second characters of the first four groups have kept their contours.But T5 becomes a rising tone 45.

Figure 5 T values:T5+Tx

Figure 5 shows the T values of T5+Tx.It is obvious that the preceding characters have the same T value with their citation tone.And the T values of their second characters have the same contours with citation tones.But T2 changes from 35 to 24.T3 changes from 31 to 42.

四、Analysis of the results

According to Ma (2009), only six groups of two-character words in Nanjing dialect have tone sandhi.And the old and new schools ofthe Nanjing dialect are both tone sandalies with the left character and the right character unchanged.

Compared with Ma’s study, the results of this study is significantly different. First, in this study,almost every group of two-character words’T values changed their ranges.Second,not only the left character changed but also the right character changed.In some groups,the two characters can change together.Third,the six groups which have tone sandhi in Ma’s study have different changes in this study.

In Ma’s study,the left character in T1+T1 changed from 41 to 44 and the right character is unchanged.In this study, both of the two characters have been changed.Ma’s study suggests that the left character in T3+T1 changed from a level tone into a rising tone.In this study,the citation tone of the left character is a falling tone.And in two-character word,it is still a falling tone.Also,the right character was changed in this study.As for group T2+T5,Ma shown that the left character was changed from a rising tone to a level tone.In this study,it changed into a falling tone.

The left character in T4+T5 is 41 and its citation tone is 45 in Ma’s study.In this study,the left character didn’t change but the right character changed from 55 to 45.The left character in T5+T5 changed from 5 to 3 in Ma’s study.But in this study,this group didn’t have difference with their citation tones.For T3+T3,Ma’s study deems that the left character changed from 11 to 24.In this study,the left character was also changed to a rising tone 24.And the right character changed from 31 to 42.

In all,this study has many differences with previous studies.Both of the two characters may have tone sandhi in this study.For left character,most their T values kept the same trend with their citation tones.In T2+T1,the left character changed from rising tone 35 to falling-rising tone 323,which is unique.For right character,many of them have changed in this study.But only T5 have its contour changed.T4 also changed into a level tone at sometime.But the T value trend is always falling for T4.

五、Summary

From the results and analysis above,we can have some conclusions.

First,young people speak Nanjing dialect quiet differently from what it used to be.Their dialect may be affected by many factors.

Second,although the results look so different from previous studies,most of the continuous sandalisms still follow the traditional sandalisms of Nanjing dialect.