宁波方言的变调现象

<正> This paper is an examination of the tone sandhi phenomenon in Ningponese. Although there is a considerable disagreement on the exact tonal value of a citation form in the dialect, the consistency of sandhi form pronunciation is remarkable. Dissyllabic words of definite sandhi patterning are summarized in a chart according to Ancient Chinese tone categories. The non-occurrence of the combinatorily possible low level tone in the second syllable is taken to be significant, not likely to be a case of an accidental gap. O. Introduction In general, when we speak of Ningponese as a dialect different from other Wu dialects, we could mean two things, it denotes (1) the language spoken in the area known as Ningpo Prefecture (including Zhoushan) 宁波府(包括舟山) in the old days; (2) the language spoken within the City of Ningpo 宁波 and Yinxian 鄞县. We will use the term in the second sense. Although Wu dialects have been studied for more than one hundred years, there have been very few studies on Ningponese dialect either in Chinese or in English, Von Mollendorff's 1901 Ningpo Syllabary offered extensive information on the initials and the finals of the dialect, but because of limitations in the contemporary linguistic techniques, his records were deficient in detailed descriptions of tones. Chao 赵元任 (1928) included Ningponese in his Studies in the Modern Wu Dialects. Again, tones were not the main interest of the studies. In 1975, P. J. Rose at the Darwin College, Cambridge, included Ningponese in his research of tones. However, according to Michael Sherard (1979), there were no published accounts of Ningponese in the Western journals. Shi Wen-tao 施文涛 (1979), a native of Ningpo, in his effort to provide logographs for some of the syllables in Ningponese, approximated the phonetic values of the consonantal initials, finals and tones in Ningponese. My conclusions are often different from his, but rather than take issue point by point here, I shall only include his citation tones below for reference. The main body of this paper will concern itself with the tone sandhi phenomenon in Ningponese.