Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 164-169).

This dissertation presents studies of tone sandhi in four major southeast Chinese dialects, Fuzhou, Shanghai, Chaozhou and Amoy, with major emphasis on Fuzhou. The dissertation argues that the sandhi found in two of these dialects is the result of an interaction between duration and tone, which interaction can be expressed easily within the limits of the "metrical theory" on stress, first developed in Liberman and Prince (1977) and expanded in recent works, most notably Hayes (1980). Fuzhou and Shanghai, which have some of the more complicated sandhi systems of the Chinese languages, are argued to have two or three syllable stress-feet, with a strongly stressed syllable grouped together with weakly stressed syllables. The weakly stressed syllables are shown to have shortened duration and loss of part of all of the original distinctive tonal contour. The details of this loss and constraints on the tonal phonology of Fuzhou and Shanghai form the bulk of the discussion of this dissertation. These dialects are contrasted to the Southern Min dialects of Amoy and Chaozhou, for which no such local level sandhi exists, and for which the analysis argues for phrase-lev phrase-final tonal changes from the traditional 'combination' form to the traditional 'isolation' form. This unorthodox approach to tonal changes in these dialects is shown to simplify morphological processes and local tone rules which exist in these languages. Finally, a fragment of Fuzhou external sandhi patterns is examined and the analysis argues that the same types of rules which apply to form stress-feet re-apply at the phrase-level. Certain complications are brought about in external sandhi due to the special nature of clitics in stress rules, and the part which thematic roles play in defining domains, but the general pattern is clear: phrase-level stressing in Fuzhou is a fairly local pattern, which forms a clear contrast to Southern Min dialects.

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In this study I addressed three problems related to how sandhi-variation, the adjustments made by speakers to the speech stream, filters comprehension for second language listener processing. The first was the need to better understand proficiency problems encountered by L2 listeners as they decode the speech stream with the phonological features of sandhi-variation, elision and assimilation, by investigating the item difficulty hierarchy of the phenomena. The second was the scarcity of research on aural processing abilities of second language learners in relation to their understanding sandhi-variation in aural texts. The third concerns the lack of research investigating links between learners’ backgrounds and their ability to handle listening texts, especially variations in the speech stream in target aural texts. The purpose of this study was threefold. My first purpose was to investigate the item difficulty hierarchy of sandhi-variation types that learners have in relation to L2 listening proficiency. My second purpose was to evaluate links between aural input containing elision and assimilation and second language aural processing, to provide insight into how learners deal with sandhi-variation as they process such input. My third purpose was to investigate through the use of interviews the aural input that participants have encountered prior to the interventions of this study, to help explain which types of aural input can facilitate intake. Twenty-five first- and second-year Japanese university students participated in the current study. The participants completed a series of instruments, which included (a) a Test of English as a Foreign Language Paper-Based Test (TOEFL PBT), (b) a Listening Vocabulary Levels Test (LVLT), (c) a Modern Language Aptitude Test–Elementary (MLAT-E), (d) a Pre-Listening in English questionnaire, (e) an Elicited Imitation Test (EIT), and (f) a Background and Length of Residency interview. The EIT was used as a sandhi-variation listening test with two component parts (i.e., elision and assimilation) and two sub-component parts (e.g., two different utterance rates), using elicited imitation. Finally, the participants were interviewed about their language backgrounds to gauge their understanding and feelings about English. An empirical item hierarchy for elision and assimilation was investigated, along with the determinants of the hierarchy. Overall, the tendency was for items with elision and assimilation to be more difficult. Results also indicated that the two input rate variables combined with elision and assimilation affected the non-native participants’ listening comprehension. Moreover, the strength of the relationship between two measures of the participants’ language ability, proficiency and aptitude, and their comprehension of items with and without the phonological features of elision and assimilation, were investigated. The results confirmed a positive relationship between language aptitude as measured by the MLAT-E and the comprehension of the phonological features of elision and assimilation. Finally, the results indicated that there were no significant, positive correlations between English language proficiency scores and both the Pre-Listening Questionnaire, which measured the participants’ feelings about second language listening, and the Background and Length of Residency Interview. More research needs to be conducted to determine how learners’ backgrounds are related to listening comprehension in order to better prescribe aural input in second language listening classrooms. / Teaching & Learning

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xv, 124 p.; also includes graphics (some col.) Includes bibliographical references (p. 119-124).

碩士 / 國立政治大學 / 語言學研究所 / 100 / This thesis examines Mandarin focal tone sandhi among Taiwan youngsters. Three types of sentences are under investigation: Type A includes the focused auxiliary verbs and adverbs in a simple sentence, Type B the flat structure, and Type C the other types of structures. Under the framework of Optimality Theory, this thesis proposes prosodic constraints and tonal constraints to account for Mandarin focal tone sandhi. This thesis adopts Cophonology Theory to explain the subgrammars of focal phrasings. There are two types of focal phrasing patterns governed by the reranking of two sets of alignment constraints (ALIGN-L(F, FP), ALIGN-L(FP, Ft)) and (ALIGN-R(F, FP), ALIGN-R(FP, Ft)). The focal phrase pertains to a special kind of intonational phrase. This thesis proposes ALIGN-E(FP, IP) to explain this condition. The undominated constraint, [FTMIN & NON-FINALITY], is proposed to ban a monosyllabic foot in sentence-final positions. IDENT-BOT is adopted to deal with the tri-tonal strings such as (σ(σσ)) and ((σσ)σ) in non-focal and focal readings. In addition, focal phrasing may force adjacent L tones to appear in different feet. OCP-L(ft) is proposed to explain this situation. To conclude, based on the constraint-based theory, and the interaction of prosodic constraints and tonal constraints, this thesis has provided a theoretical generalization of Mandarin focal tone sandhi.

It has long been observed in Mandarin Chinese that when two third tones are adjacent, the preceding third tone is realized as a second tone while the following one remains third tone. This is known as the Third Tone Sandhi Rule (TTSR). The application of TTSR in strings with more than two syllables also takes places, and is subject to the influence of syntax and semantics. The purpose of this study is to examine TTSR applications in both nonsense and meaningful strings. In the former case, this study aims to establish a purely phonological pattern for TTSR application. In the latter, this study incorporates findings in the former and explores how syntactic information is used to establish phonological structure. The analysis is conducted in the Optimality framework, where the mapping between phonology and syntax can be modeled using a set of general structural and alignment constraints. This study supports the proposition that conjunction and disjunction of constraints should be allowed to capture the complexity of syntactic structures. In addition, hierarchical phonological structures are necessary to characterize the influence of syntactic hierarchical structure on phonology. In accounting for TTSR applications, this study proposes that TTSR can be evaluated in different phonological domains but such evaluations need not be conducted in a cyclical manner.

本文旨在探討華語焦點變調，並以青年語者為主。本文分別檢驗三種不同的句型，第一類為焦點助動詞和焦點副詞，第二類為平坦結構，第三類則是其它類型的句子。在優選理論的架構下，本文分別提出韻律制約和聲調制約來詮釋華語的焦點變調。筆者透過並存音韻理論(Cophonology Theory)來說明焦點韻律結構的劃分是多個次語法的運作結果。焦點韻律結構的劃分有兩種，主要由(ALIGN-L(F, FP), ALIGN-L(FP, Ft))和(ALIGN-R(F, FP), ALIGN-R(FP, Ft))這兩組可移動的對整制約來決定，當它們在制約排序中移動到不同的位置時會形成不同的韻律結構劃分。本研究發現焦點詞組等同於語調詞組，因此提出另一個對整制約ALIGN-E(FP, IP)來解釋。排序最高的韻律制約則是[FTMIN & NON-FINALITY]，目的在於避免單音節音步出現在句末。至於聲調制約，筆者採用IDENT-BOT來處理三音節音步的變調結果。此外，焦點韻律結構的劃分會造成兩個相鄰的上聲出現在不同的音步之中，OCP-L(ft)可以確保此形式的保留。簡言之，本文藉由優選理論的觀點，以及韻律制約和聲調制約的互動，對華語焦點變調提出了一個整體分析。 / This thesis examines Mandarin focal tone sandhi among Taiwan youngsters. Three types of sentences are under investigation: Type A includes the focused auxiliary verbs and adverbs in a simple sentence, Type B the flat structure, and Type C the other types of structures. Under the framework of Optimality Theory, this thesis proposes prosodic constraints and tonal constraints to account for Mandarin focal tone sandhi. This thesis adopts Cophonology Theory to explain the subgrammars of focal phrasings. There are two types of focal phrasing patterns governed by the reranking of two sets of alignment constraints (ALIGN-L(F, FP), ALIGN-L(FP, Ft)) and (ALIGN-R(F, FP), ALIGN-R(FP, Ft)). The focal phrase pertains to a special kind of intonational phrase. This thesis proposes ALIGN-E(FP, IP) to explain this condition. The undominated constraint, [FTMIN & NON-FINALITY], is proposed to ban a monosyllabic foot in sentence-final positions. IDENT-BOT is adopted to deal with the tri-tonal strings such as (σ(σσ)) and ((σσ)σ) in non-focal and focal readings. In addition, focal phrasing may force adjacent L tones to appear in different feet. OCP-L(ft) is proposed to explain this situation. To conclude, based on the constraint-based theory, and the interaction of prosodic constraints and tonal constraints, this thesis has provided a theoretical generalization of Mandarin focal tone sandhi.