Diagnosing dominance: Problematic sandhi types in the Chinese Wu dialect of Jinshan

Abstract

The concept of phonological dominance plays an important role in typologizing tone sandhi behavior in Sinitic languages. We confront the diagnostic criteria for dominance with data from Jinshan, a northern Wu dialect with complex disyllabic lexical tone sandhi. Auditory and acoustic data for the seven Jinshan tones in monosyllabic words are presented and compared with their realization in several different types of disyllabic word tone. It is argued that the current criteria for deciding the dominance of tone sandhi require refinement, which, when applied, reveal examples of both left and right dominance within the same lexical tone sandhi system.