Right-Dominant Tones in Zhangzhou: On and Through Phonetic Surface

Abstract This study conducts a systematic acoustic exploration into the phonetic nature of rightmost tones in a right-dominant tone sandhi system based on empirical data from 21 native speakers of Zhangzhou Southern Min, which presents eight tonal contrasts at the underlying level. The results reveal that, (a) the F0 contour shape realisation of rightmost tones in Zhangzhou appears not to be categorically affected by their preceding tones. (b) Seven out of eight rightmost tones have two statistically significantly different variants in their F0 onset realisation, indicating their regressive sensitivity to the offset phonetics of preceding tones. (c) The forms of rightmost tones are not straightforward related to their counterparts in citation. Instead, two versions of the F0 system can be identified, with the unmarked forms resembling their citation values and the marked forms occurring as a consequence of the phonetic impact of their preceding tones and the F0- declining effect of utterance-final position. (d) The phonetic variation of rightmost tones reflects the across-linguistic tendency of tonal articulation in connected speech but contradicts the default principle for identifying the right dominance of tone sandhi in Sinitic languages. Keywords: Right-dominant tones, Zhangzhou 1 Introduction The realisations of tones can be alternated when they come into contact with one other in connected speech. The process of contextually triggered tonal alternation is referred to as tone sandhi in the linguistic literature (Benedict, 1948; Pike, 1948; Leiste, 1976; Gandour, 1978; Ballard, 1988; Chen, 2002; Zhang, 2007; Ratliff, 2015). Amongst those languages where tone sandhi is prevalent, they vary considerably in the way that tones change, what has motivated tones to change, and under what domain tones are supposed to change, resulting in a dynamic and diverse profile of tone sandhi as a language phenomenon particularly. This can be straightforward illustrated by the classification of the tone sandhi system in Sinitic languages, which is conventionally categorised into either right-dominant or left-dominant, depending on the position where syllables are supposed to retain the forms of their corresponding citation tones and keep the range of tonal contrasts. For example, Shanghainese and many Wu dialects are often reported to exhibit a left-dominant sandhi system, in which the initial syllables preserve their citation forms and syntagmatically extend the realisations rightwards over the entire sandhi domain (Ballard, 1998; Chen, 2000; Duanmu, 2005; Zhang, 2007). In contrast, other Sinitic languages like Southern Wu and most Min are classified as having a right-dominant sandhi system because the final (rightmost) syllables are assumed to remain the tonal contrasts and values of citation forms, while those of non-final tones are replaced by their corresponding sandhi forms (Wright, 1983; Shih, 1986; Ballard, 1988; Chen, 2000; Zhang, 2007; Rose, 2016). Thus, the preservation of citation forms has been regarded as a default principle to classify the dominancy of a tone sandhi system. However, are the citation forms intactly preserved without any change? Are the forms not affected by the surrounding contexts, even at the phonetic level? Does not the continuous motion of vocal apparatus in connected speech …

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