Abstract for Keynote at PCC 2010- 第九届中国语音学学术会议
Wonderful Wu
A personal take on the fascination of phonetics in synchronic and diachronic Wu dialect phonology Phil Rose
Australian National University The Wu dialects of East Central China were among the first to be researched and described with western linguistic methods. Liu Fu (aka Liu Bannong) published a description of acoustic aspects of Jiangyin tones and consonants made with a kymograph in 1925, and Chao Yuen-ren's 1928 virtuoso monograph on the Wu dialects is unlikely ever to be surpassed as a descriptive work. Chao – he was a musician, as well as philosopher, physicist, composer, linguist and translator – used a sliding pitch-pipe to imitate the melody of his informants' tones. His musical tonal transcriptions are so good that one can actually derive acoustic values from them that can be compared with the modern data. Kennedy's (1953) description of left-to-right tone spreading in Tangsic documented autosegmental behaviour of tone several decades before autosegmental phonology delinked its first tone from its first tone bearing unit. The Wu dialects are probably best known for their complexity in matters tonal: the variety of tonal shapes; the involvement in tonal contrast of dimensions other than pitch, like phonation type and duration; and last but not least the relationship between tone and morpho-syntactic structure, revealed in their tone sandhi. This makes them a goldmine for phoneticians and phonologists seeking to analyse, model and understand the ways humans encode meaning in sound. A goldmine that has to be mined carefully, however, with phonetically adequate descriptions. Wu dialects are very special for me. I cut my descriptive phonetic teeth on them in the early 70's and have been captivated with their complexities ever since. In this keynote, I give a few tidbits – mostly from the Yongjiang涌江 and Oujiang瓯江dialect areas – showing how detailed phonetic description and analysis can yield interesting and challenging insights on the nature of tone. I will say something about the following topics, which all have to do with what we mean by that little word tone. I shall make the point that we have to include much more than pitch for an adequate characterisation of tone in Wu. This leads on naturally to the topic of phonation types, several of which are found in Wu behaving in phonologically different ways (although all are related to tone). One cannot talk about Wu, of course, without mentioning tone sandhi, and I will give examples, from Shanghai, Zhenhai镇海, Wenzhou, Wencheng文成 and Lishui丽水, of the ways in which Wu varieties differ in their sandhi mechanics. Specifically I will focus on what Wu morpho-tonemic gymnastics tell us about the relationship between syllable-initial consonant voicing and pitch; and how this in turn suggests that Wu may have fewer tones than is usually assumed. I also show the problems that Wenzhou tone sandhi makes for the

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