the common word prosody in Northern Wu

Abstract

This study revisits the phonological representation and phonetic implementation of tone sandhi of Wu dialects by exam-ining three Northern Wu dialects that still have seven or eight monosyllabic tones. It is found that the implementation of tone sandhi is highly variable across tonal categories and dialects, and complete spreading is relatively rare. Despite all kinds of variations, we found that there is a common word prosody template shared by Northern Wu dialects: 1) non-initial syllables also contribute to the sandhi patterns; 2) both initial and non-initial syllables undergo neutralization, with the initial syllable neutralizing contours and the non-initial syllable neutralizing registers. In addition, because of the reduced pitch range of the non-initial syllables, the contribution of the non-initial syllables is likely to get lost in Wu dialects.