Experimental Studies on the Word Tone in the Chinese Dialects

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It is well known that Chinese is a monosyllable based tone language, but in Guanhua and Wu dialects the interaction of stress accent and tone has given birth to the word tone, which is synchronically predictable either by the tone of the first syllable or that of the last syllable within a polysyllabic phonological word.In the present research, phonetic characteristics of the word tone are investigated mainly by experimental techniques. Acoustic measurements were made on tens of Guanhua and Wu dialects ; articulatory EMA experiments were conducted on the Standard Bejing Mandarin. These data were analyzed and examined with reference to the data obtained by the physiological EMG experiment.It is argued that the "word tone" theory proposed by T.Hayata is effective in analyzing the tonal and accentual phenomena observable in Chinese dialects. Some theoretical issues were discussed in historical perspectives ; development of stress accent, emergence of the accentual phenomena, differentiation of the word tone category disappearance of stress accent and loss of the morphemic identity.