Wuxi tone sandhi from last to first syllable dominance

Abstract Wuxi is a Northern Wu dialect of Chinese spoken in Wuxi district, the administrative center of which is Wuxi City, located about thirty miles northwest of Suzhou, and another fifty miles further from Shanghai. The Wuxi dialect exhibits some interesting behaviour with respect to its tone sandhi patterning that has not been reported in the literature. [1] The dialect has two strategies for tone sandhi patterning — pattern extension and pattern substitution — both of which involve the first syllable as “dominant”, as determining the tone patterning in the sandhi span (Yue-Hashimoto 1980). Pattern extension simply involves taking the tone melody that was on the first syllable and extending that pattern onto the entire tone sandhi span. Pattern substitution requires one additional step before the tone-spreading; namely, the replacement of the tone melody on the first syllable with a new melody before its spread onto the tone sandhi domain.