37.3274, Books: Phantom Stress in Tone Sandhi: Wen (2026)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3274. Mon Oct 12 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3274, Books: Phantom Stress in Tone Sandhi: Wen (2026)

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Date: 12-Oct-2026
From: Jan Martin [lotdissertations-fgw at uva.nl]
Subject: Phantom Stress in Tone Sandhi: Wen (2026)


Title: Phantom Stress in Tone Sandhi
Subtitle: Evidence from Shaoxing Wu Chinese
Series Title: LOT Dissertation Series
Publication Year: 2026

Publisher: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke
(LOT)
           http://www.lotpublications.nl/
Book URL: https://dx.medra.org/10.48273/LOT0724

Author(s): Xinyi Wen

Paperback
ISBN: 978-94-6093-509-1
Pages: 183
Price: 34,00 euros

Abstract:

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.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 Wuvarieties, and offer new empirical evidence on how
morphosyntactic structure and constituent size interact in prosodic
constituent formation.

Linguistic Field(s): Phonetics

Subject Language(s): Wu Chinese (wuu, wuch1236)

Language Family(ies): Chinese




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