Stress and Tone Sandhi in Lipu Dialect

This paper investigates tone and stress interaction in Lipu Dialect of Chinese, focusing on the data description of stress and tone in this dialect. Our investigation leads to the following conclusions: (1) Stress affects tone sandhi in that stressed syllables usually maintain the lexical tone, while unstressed syllables often undergo tone sandhi. (2) Stress patterns of disyllabic words are determined by their morphosyntactic structure. (3) Syntactic structures have no effect on the stress patterns of trisyllabic words. It is always the case that the last syllable takes the primary stress, the first syllable takes the secondary stress, and the middle syllable is unstressed. (4) Semantics plays an important role in determining the stress patterns in reduplicated words.