A Linguistic Study of the Tonal Characteristics among the Three-Syllable Words in Shanghai Dialect with Its Counterpart in Mandarin

 

Yaoyi Lu (吕瑶忆)

Seton Hall University

 

This paper is going to mainly focus on the tone patterns of Shanghai dialect in terms of three-syllable nouns with respect to their counterparts in Mandarin. For example, 上海人 (záw-hae-nin) Shanghai people and 火车站 (hú-tsuo-zae) train station. Meanwhile, three research questions are going to be figured out in this paper

 

1.  What are the tone patterns of three-syllable nouns in Shanghai dialect with respect to the counterparts in Mandarin

2.  Are there any rules when those Mandarin words were pronounced in Shanghai dialect? If so, what are the rules?

3.  When teaching students to learn three-syllable nouns in Shanghai dialect, what kind of methods can be used and what is the contribution of the conclusion in this paper

 The reason I choose this topic for my research study is due to the following reasons. First of all, Shanghai is a city that gathers many different languages and cultures developed till now since the 1940s. Around 14 million people nowadays speak Shanghai dialect as the native language, and many people from other provinces in China and all around the world have interests in learning and researching Shanghai dialect. Secondly, the former researchers have made fruits on the topic of Shanghai dialect studies; Richard Simmons concluded the vowels, the finals and five tones for Shanghai dialect, which are different from Mandarin. When it comes toMandarin, it has four tones according to Chen Ping’s research, which are yīnpíng (level) (55), yángpíng (rising) (35), shàngshēng (falling and rising) (214) and qùshēng (falling) (51). The representative words of those tones can be four different pronunciations of  (a, in English is ah), as we all know they are the first tone, the second, the third and the fourth. By contrast, according to Richard Simmons’s research theory, in Shanghai dialect, there are three basic tone contours---rising, falling and rising-falling; two registers: high and low; and two tone types--abrupt and non-abrupt. The contours, registers, and types combine to make the following five tones: 阴平rising, 阴上 /  rising-falling,  () falling, 阴入 abrupt, and 阳入 level.

 

Since former researchers had not worked on the topic of tonal rules in three character words in Shanghai dialect yet, I started doing this research by collecting the common words consisting of three characters from Dr. Simmon’s dictionary. This paper is going to analyze nouns consisting of three syllables in Shanghai dialect. For those special cases, I will discuss them one by one and try to find out the rules.

 

Furthermore, in the last part, I will introduce a lesson plan on how to teach those words in Shanghai dialect to students. My research method for this paper will be data collection and analysis from the Internet, library, books, articles and journals as well as Shanghai dialect native speakers and learners. It also includes case studies of some specific tonal characteristics in words and sentences of Mandarin and Shanghai dialect. Therefore, it is worthy to discuss the feature of Shanghai dialect in terms of tones. Hopefully, this paper can make some contributions to the field of linguistic studies and teaching three-syllable nouns in the Shanghai dialect.