Tone sandhi in Xiangshan Wu Chinese and beyond: patterns of variation and diachronic development
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis investigates tone sandhi in Xiangshan Wu Chinese, an under-documented dialect within the Northern Wu group, with a focus on disyllabic and trisyllabic domains. Drawing on fieldwork data, it provides the first systematic acoustic documentation and analysis of Xiangshan tone sandhi. The findings contribute new empirical data, introduce innovative methodology for bottom-up prosodic research, and offer a new theoretical perspective on the development of tone sandhi systems in Wu dialects. Chapters 3 through 6 present the empirical findings. Chapter 3 establishes the Xiangshan monosyllabic tone system as a foundation for the sandhi analyses. Chapters 4 and 5 examine disyllabic tone sandhi across three syntactic structures, identifying general patterns aligned with typological observations across Northern Wu: lexical compounds and adjective-noun phrases (Chapter 4) share broadly left-dominant sandhi (LDS), while verb-object phrases (Chapter 5) typically exhibit right-dominant sandhi (RDS). Chapter 6 extends the analysis to trisyllabic domains, which involve more complex syntactic configurations built on, but not reducible to, the disyllabic types. Noun-headed trisyllables typically show a temporal expansion of LDS patterns, while verb-headed ones deviate from their disyllabic RDS counterparts, instead exhibiting a distinct LDS pattern. Crucially, though both adopt LDS, their output sandhi forms differ systematically, maintaining the syntactic contrast. Despite these general patterns, the Xiangshan system exhibits rich and structured variation, summarised along six aspects in Chapter 7: syntactic sensitivity, historical relevance, register split, domain independence, non-discrete dominance, and speaker variation. Existing synchronic frameworks, particularly edge-based and stress-based approaches, fail to account for this full range, especially those historically rooted. I propose a diachronic account tracing the emergence of LDS as a morphophonological marker o…
abstract: This thesis investigates tone sandhi in Xiangshan Wu Chinese, an under-documented dialect within the Northern Wu group, with a focus on disyllabic and trisyllabic domains. Drawing on fieldwork data, it provides the first systematic acoustic documentation and analysis of Xiangshan tone sandhi. The findings contribute new empirical data, introduce innovative methodology for bottom-up prosodic research, and offer a new theoretical perspective on the development of tone sandhi systems in Wu dialects. Chapters 3 through 6 present the empirical findings. Chapter 3 establishes the Xiangshan monosyllabic tone system as a foundation for the sandhi analyses. Chapters 4 and 5 examine disyllabic tone sandhi across three syntactic structures, identifying general patterns aligned with typological observations across Northern Wu: lexical compounds and adjective-noun phrases (Chapter 4) share broadly left-dominant sandhi (LDS), while verb-object phrases (Chapter 5) typically exhibit right-dominant sandhi (RDS). Chapter 6 extends the analysis to trisyllabic domains, which involve more complex syntactic configurations built on, but not reducible to, the disyllabic types. Noun-headed trisyllables typically show a temporal expansion of LDS patterns, while verb-headed ones deviate from their disyllabic RDS counterparts, instead exhibiting a distinct LDS pattern. Crucially, though both adopt LDS, their output sandhi forms differ systematically, maintaining the syntactic contrast. Despite these general patterns, the Xiangshan system exhibits rich and structured variation, summarised along six aspects in Chapter 7: syntactic sensitivity, historical relevance, register split, domain independence, non-discrete dominance, and speaker variation. Existing synchronic frameworks, particularly edge-based and stress-based approaches, fail to account for this full range, especially those historically rooted. I propose a diachronic account tracing the emergence of LDS as a morphophonological marker o…
author: Shi, Yibing
language: eng
keywords: Chinese languages, tone sandhi, tones
license: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/0f01041c-ea7b-4509-af29-c20d0584a1ab/download
license: http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved
date published: 2025-09-29
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:33:30Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.130601