Disyllabic Tone Sandhi and Neutral Tone Patterns in Yichang Dialect

摘要

Previous studies have shown the uniqueness of disyllabic tone sandhi in different dialects. Yichang dialect also has such distinctiveness, but no research on this aspect was done. In this study, we studied the phonological patterns with the aid of one pronunciation collaborator. It was found that there are two disyllabic tone sandhi patterns in Yichang dialect. One pattern is when the second word has a neutral tone, and the other is when the second word has one of the four usual tones. It also shows that the existence of the second characters in phrases makes a difference to the choice of tone sandhi patterns.