Dialect-geographical Acoustic-Tonetics: Five disyllabic tone sandhi patterns in cognate words from the Wu dialects of Zhèjiāng province

The typology of tone sandhi patterns on disyllabic tonally cognate words in selected sub-groups of the Wu dialects of the east-central Chinese province of Zhejiang is investigated using data from 48 sites collected over 45 years. A new method of extrinsic z-score normalisation is demonstrated which permits comparison of tones across dialects with different pitch ranges. Five different but typical right-dominant word-tone patterns are identified, acoustically quantified, and their geographical distribution specified. It is hypothesized that changes in isolation tones, and different types of dissimilation of the first tone from the word-final tone, are a possible origin of the observed variation.