Citation Phil ROSE. 2016. Complexities of Tonal Realisation in a Right-Dominant Chinese Wu Dialect – Disyllabic Tone Sandhi in a Speaker from Wencheng. Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 9:48-80 URL http://hdl.handle.net/1885/99985 Reviewed Received 02/05/2015, revised text accepted 01/12/2015, published March 2016 Editors Editor-In-Chief Dr Mark Alves | Managing Eds. Dr Sigrid Lew, Dr Paul Sidwell Web http://jseals.org ISSN 1836-6821 www.jseals.org | Volume 9 | 2016 | Asia-Pacific Linguistics, ANU Copyright vested in the author; Creative Commons Attribution Licence COMPLEXITIES OF TONAL REALISATION IN A RIGHT- DOMINANT CHINESE WU DIALECT – DISYLLABIC TONE SANDHI IN A SPEAKER FROM WENCHENG Phil Rose Emeritus Faculty, Australian National University <
[email protected]> Abstract An acoustically-based description is given of the isolation tones and right-dominant tone sandhi in disyllabic words of a male speaker of the Chinese Oūjiāng 甌江 Wú 吳 dialect of Wénchéng 文成. His seven isolation tones show typical Wu complexity, comprising two mid-level, two rising, two falling-rising and one depressed level pitch shapes. Typical too is his three-way voicing contrast in syllable-Onset stops. However, the typical Wu relationship between tonal register and phonemic Onset voicing is shown to be disrupted, Onset voicing no longer correlating with tonal pitch height. The word-final tones in sandhi are shown to be straightforwardly related, phonologically and phonetically, to the isolation tones, with biuniqueness preserved. The realization of the word-initial tones in sandhi, on the other hand, involves complex mergers conditioned by largely non-phonetic factors related to historical tone categories, resulting in five extra sandhi tones that do not occur in isolation.