THE PHONOLOGY OF INCOMPLETE TONE MERGER IN DALIAN.

The thesis of tone merger in northern Chinese dialects was first proposed by Wang (1982), and further developed by Lien (1986), the migration of IIb (Yangshang) into III (Qu) being a common characteristic. The present work aims to provide an update on the current state of tone merger in northern Chinese, with a special focus on Dalian, which is a less well-known Mandarin dialect spoken in Liaoning province in Northeast China. According to Song ( 1963), four lexical tones are observed in citation form, i.e. 312, 34, 213 and 53 (henceforth Old Dalian). Our first-hand data obtained from a young female speaker of Dalian (henceforth Modern Dalian) suggest an inventory of three lexical tones, i.e. 51, 35 and 213. The lexical tone 312 in Old Dalian, derived from la (Yinping), is merging with 51, derived from III (Qu), in the modern system. This variation across decades is consistent with dialects spoken in the neighboring Shandong province, where a reduced tonal inventory of three tones is becoming more and more frequent. However, the tone merger in Modern Dalian is incomplete on two grounds. On the one hand, a slight phonetic difference is observed between these two falling tones: both of them have similar FO values, but the falling contour derived from la (Yinping) has a longer duration compared with the falling contour derived from III (Qu). Nevertheless, the speaker judges the contours to be the same. On the other hand, the underlying contrasts of these two contours surface in tone sandhi contexts, such that the lexical tone 312 of Old Dalian emerges in combination forms in Modern Dalian. The above facts attest that sound change is not lexically abrupt, and could take a long period of time to complete its course (Wang 1969). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]