The function of the covariant diminutive tone in the Tangxi Wu dialect

In the Tangxi Wu dialect,the covariant tone,the high level tone [55],is used as the diminutive tone for all tones.This paper finds that:1)It can represent diminutives with nasal coda [] in finals or by itself;2)It can apply to some action verbs to express a relax feeling and a joking mood;3)It can not only turn some monosyllablic words with full meaning into adverbs,but also turn some adverbial-modifying phrases,verb-object phrases and subject-predicate phrases into adverbs,conjunctions,or abstract verbs.It can also make some adverbs to become marked ones,which is described as a sort of grammaticalization in the paper.