On Yiyang Disyllabic Tone Sandhi in Hunan Province

Abstract

: The paper aims at analyzing the tone sandhi in Yiyang (hereafter YY in short) Dialect. It will describe the citation tones and sandhi phenomena in YY dialect, and then generally summarize the rules of disyllabic tone sandhi. YY tone sandhi is related to the interaction between light syllable and stressed syllable, and tone sandhi only occurs in light syllables. Among YY tones, there are three rising tones (yinping34, yangping13 and rusheng45), two falling tones (shangsheng41 and qusheng21). The five tones would change when they posit in the light syllable. In detail, when yinping34 and yangping13 posit in the light syllable, both change its pitch value into 33; when shangsheng41 and qusheng21 posit in the light syllable, both realize as a low level tone 11; T5 transforms its value into 44 when it is in the light syllable.