Contour-tone spreading and tone sandhi in Danyang Chinese

Abstract

An important contribution to our knowledge of tone sandhi among the Chinese dialects is Lü's (1980) article on the tones and tone sandhi behaviour of Danyang, a Wu dialect of Chinese. Lü's description of Danyang is, to date, our only source on the dialect. While it is a northern Wu dialect, the tone sandhi patterning in Danyang differs from Shanghai, Suzhou, Wuxi and other dialects in the vicinity. There are a number of interesting problems related to tone in the dialect. This paper restricts the topic to only one of these problems, namely the treatment of the six basic tone patterns in Danyang, focusing in particular on the pattern in which a contour tone is copied Onto adjacent syllables in the tone sandhi domain.