ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 investigates the formation and the restructuring of the intonational phrase in the Fuzhou dialect and analyzes Fuzhou phonological phenomena that refer crucially to the intonational phrase domain. This chapter shows that the intonational phrase in Fuzhou shares some common features with the intonational phrase in other languages with respect to its domain formation and restructuring. It is demonstrated that semantic and pragmatic factors, such as length, rate of speech, style, and contrastive prominence, would influence the formation and the restructuring of the intonational phrase domain in Fuzhou. Moreover, the application of Fuzhou phonological rules within the intonational phrase domain exhibits a great degree of variability caused by semantic and pragmatic factors, which is not allowed in any other prosodic domains in this dialect.
