Leiden University Scholarly Publications

Wen, X. (2026)

Phantom stress in tone sandhi: evidence from Shaoxing Wu Chinese

Doctoral Thesis

This dissertation investigates the potential tone-stress interaction in Shaoxing Wu Chinese, a Northern Wu variety exhibiting complex sandhi patterns, through a series of controlled acoustic experiments. The findings reveal that stress cannot provide a consistent account of tonal realizations across different domains in Shaoxing Wu Chinese. At the word level, left- and right-dominant sandhi patterns are found to coexist, yet no independent acoustic correlates of stress are observed. At the compound level, all 2+1 and the vast majority of 1+2 compounds form a single sandhi domain, with tonal contours conditioned primarily by the initial syllable alone, which is incompatible with stress-based predictions. At the phrase level, disyllabic verb-object and subject-predicate structures display different tonal patterns, but the distinction disappears in longer sequences, suggesting an interaction between syntactic structure and constituent size that stress cannot adequately capture....Show moreThis dissertation investigates the potential tone-stress interaction in Shaoxing Wu Chinese, a Northern Wu variety exhibiting complex sandhi patterns, through a series of controlled acoustic experiments. The findings reveal that stress cannot provide a consistent account of tonal realizations across different domains in Shaoxing Wu Chinese. At the word level, left- and right-dominant sandhi patterns are found to coexist, yet no independent acoustic correlates of stress are observed. At the compound level, all 2+1 and the vast majority of 1+2 compounds form a single sandhi domain, with tonal contours conditioned primarily by the initial syllable alone, which is incompatible with stress-based predictions. At the phrase level, disyllabic verb-object and subject-predicate structures display different tonal patterns, but the distinction disappears in longer sequences, suggesting an interaction between syntactic structure and constituent size that stress cannot adequately capture. These results call for a more empirically grounded approach to tone-stress interaction in Sinitic varieties and highlight the importance of investigating complex sandhi patterns. Moreover, the tone sandhi patterns in Shaoxing Wu Chinese reveal more general tendencies across Northern Wu varieties, and offer new empirical evidence on how morphosyntactic structure and constituent size interact in prosodic constituent formation.Show less

Shaoxing Wu Chinese

Tone sandhi

Tone-stress interaction

Tonal variation

Syntax-prosody interface

All authors

Wen, X.

Supervisor

Chen, Y.; Cheng, L.L.

Committee

Kula, N.C.; Feng, S.F.; Post, B.P.; Storme, B.P.P.

Qualification

Doctor (dr.)

Awarding Institution

Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University

Date

2026-09-17

Title of host publication

LOT dissertation series

Publisher

Amsterdam: LOT

ISBN (print)

9789460935091

DOI

doi:10.48273/LOT0724

Publication Series

Name

724