Pingyao Dialect (平遙 / 平遥 | Píngyáo)

By James Campbell

Classification | Map | Tones | Sandhi | Numbers | Phonology | Recordings

Classification:
Jin > Bingzhou
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For academic analysis (in English) of complex tone sandhi as featured here in Pingyao dialect, I recommend getting in touch with professor Jie Zhang.

If you are unfamiliar with the terms sandhi, or citation tones, please refer first to the FAQ page.

There are five citation tones in the Pingyao dialect, three long (舒聲) and two short (入聲). There are a total of ten sandhi tones produced, of which five are the same as the citation tones, the other five occurring only in a sandhi environment. Disregarding the occlusive, or short 入聲 tones, there are three distinct tonal contours: [13] (陰平, 陽平, 陰入), [35] (去聲), [53] (上聲, 陽入). Of the ten sandhi tones, five are 舒聲 and five are 入聲, the 入聲 being short versions of the 舒聲 tones. So the sandhi tones can be described as five distinct tonal contours: [13], [53], [35], [31], and [412].

In the Pingyao dialect, tone sandhi occurs depending on a word's grammatical function in the sentence. First, let's look at five kinds of words that influence tone sandhi. Since tone sandhi only occurs in character combinations (hence making up words), all such words are some kind of compound. They are: adjective-noun (偏正), verb-object (動賓), subject-predicate (主謂), compound (並列), and verb-complement (動補).

The first table demonstrates combinations of two characters. Here two kinds of grammatical functions have an effect on sandhi: verb-object/subject-predicates, and compounds including verb-complement and adjective-noun. Listed down the left side is the first character of a sandhi group, and across the top the second character of a sandhi group. The order of the traditional tone categories have been rearranged throughout the tables so that tones with the same contours are next to each other in the table. This also allows a way to simplify the table. Please note that citation tones remain black and sandhi tones are marked in red. As throughout the rest of this site, the shorter 入聲 characters are marked in tonal contour with an underline.

Three-character sandhi can be grouped three different ways: the first two syllables reduplicated, the last two syllables reduplicated, and non-reduplication. The following table demonstrates tone sandhi with first-two syllable reduplication.

Focusing only on tone contours and disregarding the tone shortness of 入聲 characters, the table above can be simplified as follows:

The next table demonstrates tone sandhi for three-syllable words where the last two characters are reduplicated. Note that although 平聲 citation tone is always [13], the difference between 陰平 and 陽平 still has an effect on tone sandhi.

Here is the simplified version of the table above:

Finally, to understand the non-reduplicated tone sandhi tables, it is important to regroup the grammatical functions as in the table below. The letters A, B, C are representative of these grouped grammatical functions and reappear in the non-reduplicated tone sandhi tables.

Here is what this chart means. Sandhi occurrences can be broken down into different environments, but in this case it is not clear cut between word functions, it also depends on whether the 3-syllable group has a compound in the first two characters or in the last two characters.

Let's look at the groups one by one. Group A covers adjective-nouns where the first two characters need to be a verb-object or subject-predicate compound. It also covers verb-object compounds regardless of the number of syllables, and subject-predicates where the subject is one syllable and the predicate two. Group B also covers adjective-nouns but where the first two characters should be a verb-complement or adjective-noun of itself. Group B also covers compounds, verb-complements and adjective-nouns where the nouns are made up of two syllables. Group C covers subject-predicates where the subject makes up two syllables, the predicate one.

Below is the table for non-reduplicated three-syllable tone sandhi.

Here is the simplified version of the table above:

Further tables and usage examples will be added on an ongoing basis to this page.