Acoustic study of tonal patterns of Mayang dialect in hunan province

Abstract

The present study mainly examines the citation tone and tone sandhi patterns of Mayang dialect through the traditional ways as well as the acoustic experiments. As for the citaion tone, Mayang dialect shows four types, i.e., Yinping, Yangping, Shangsheng and Qusheng. Specific values are: 55, 213, 323, and 44. In regards with the di-syllabic tone patterns, there are basically no tone sandhi of from the two level tones, however, their tonal values change to some extent. Specifically, if the tortuous tone of Mayang dialect locates in the initial of the disyllabic items, there will be a loss of tail. On the other hand, when the tortuous tone lies in the final position of the di-syllabic items, it shows few changes of tonal values. Further, the tone value of the first Tone2 turns into 23 in tone sandhi patterns of Tone 2. In this case, tone sandhi patterns of Tone3 are different from Mandarin for there are no changes in tonal value. As for neutral-tone syllable, the T-value shape of neutral tone is falling and the duration of the neutral tone shows half length as the citation tone.