An Empirical Study On Tonal Patterns Of Shandong Dialects

–-Tonal patterns in spoken language carry rich semantic and sentiment information. However, they may differ significantly from dialect to dialect, even within the same language. Therefore, understanding dialect-specific tonal patterns plays an important role for developing intelligent and customized speech understanding and generation technologies. The present study adopts phonetic experiments to systematically investigate the citation tone and tone sandhi patterns of Liaocheng and Tai’an dialects that belong to the Shangdong dialectal region in China. It aims to provide empirical data for the theoretical analysis and explore the diversities of tonal phenomenon within Shandong (Hereinafter, as SD) dialect. Results demonstrate that both of these two dialects have four citation tones, i.e., Tone 1(14), Tone2 (51), Tone3 (55), and Tone4 (35) in Liaocheng dialect; Tone 1(14), Tone2 (51), Tone3 (55), and Tone4 (213) in Tai’an dialect. Due to the difference of Tone4 between these two dialects, Tai’an dialect exhibits more kinds of tone sandhi patterns than Liaocheng dialect. This result lies in the devious tone4 in Tai’an dialect, which triggers more tonal variations in disyllabic sequences.