Phrasal-level tone sandhi in the Shaxian dialect of Min Chinese

Abstract

This study investigates the phrasal-level tone sandhi in the Shaxian dialect, a Central Min dialect of Chinese spoken in Shaxian, Fujian. Several previous studies on tones and tone sandhi in this dialect have recognized that Shaxian has six citation tones and the non-final tone in a given string will undergo tone sandhi. Although previous studies have noticed tone sandhi phenomena in Shaxian, their investigations are confined to the lexical level. Phrasal-level tone sandhi in Shaxian, by contrast, has never been recorded in detail or discussed. This study fills the gap of research and shows that Shaxian tone sandhi at the phrasal level is much more complicated than that at the lexical level. At the lexical level, whether and how tone sandhi applies are merely decided by the combination of tones, while whether tone sandhi occurs in a given phrasal-level construction is determined by the internal syntactic structure of the construction in addition to the tonal combination. Within the framework of prosodic phonology, this study demonstrates that the tone sandhi domain at the phrasal level in Shaxian is the phonological phrase—it is only within the phonological phrase domain that tone sandhi in Shaxian can apply at the phrasal level, while tone sandhi is obligatorily blocked if two neighboring tones belong to separate phonological phrases. It is also demonstrated in this study that the phonological phrase in the Shaxian dialect can be constructed with a slightly revised version of the Relation-based Approach to phonological phrasing.