Abstract
This paper examines the nature of ‘tone spreading’ in Daishan , a northern Wu dialect of Chinese, from the viewpoint of acoustic phonetics. It compares the mean falling fundamental frequency (FO) contour of disyllabic lexical items with that of monosyllabic citation forms in order to investigate if they are the same. The result shows that they are nearly identical, and therefore, demonstrates phonetic tone spreading as well as phonological tone spreading Acoustic data from Mende (Kupa Mende : Sierra Leone) are then presented and contrasted with those of Daishan. It is shown that the contouricity of the F О in fact differs between these two varieties. This result brings into question the autosegmentally based representation of tones using non-contour features such as HL, which has been commonly applied to the analysis of Wu tone sandhi. Finally, it is suggested that unitary contour features of tone, such as [falling], be applied in the case of Daishan tone spreading.
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