Speaker: Bingzi Yu (MIT) and Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)
Title: Tones and tone sandhi in Chengdu Mandarin
Time: Monday, October 20th, 5pm – 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: Chengdu Mandarin is a variety of Mandarin Chinese spoken in southwestern China. Like Standard Mandarin, it has four citation tones, but the tone contours and sandhi patterns differ notably. The table below summarizes the etymological correspondences between tones in the two dialects:
| Tone | Standard Mandarin | Chengdu Mandarin |
| T1 | 55 – High level | 35 – High rising |
| T2 | 35 – High rising | 31 – Low falling |
| T3 | 213 – Dipping | 51 – High falling |
| T4 | 51 – High falling | 213 – Dipping |
In this talk, we will present acoustic description of both the citation tones and tone sandhi in Chengdu Mandarin based on recent recordings and propose a constraint-based account that captures most of the observed sandhi patterns. In addition, we raise some interesting yet unsolved puzzles. Among them, we will focus on the phonological representation of the Chengdu dipping tone (T4 in the table above) and its unusual sandhi behavior.