AN EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF THE INTER-RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE DIPHTHONG AND THE TONE IN FUZHOU CHINESE

Gongguan Peng
Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong

ID 1297
[full paper]

An interesting phenomenon in Fuzhou Chinese is the co-variation of the rhyme and the tone. The alternating rhymes will assume different forms when associated with different sets of tones. Several suggestions have been put forward to explain the relation between the intrinsic pitch of the vowel and the tongue height of the vowel. However, these suggestions rely on different sources which differ somewhat in their descriptions of the number of the diphthongs which show alternations depending on the tone. The considerable variation in the use of symbols suggests the desirability of more acoustic data. Results show that there is no significant differences between those finals with /e, o, a/ as the nucleus occurring in different sets of tones. Duration result of the diphthongs shows that the distribution of time of each component in the falling diphthongs will change when associated with different sets of tones.