<OT> New Posting: ROA-549

[Rutgers Optimality Archive]

=======================================================================
*PLEASE NOTE*
The following is one of 13 announcements for new ROA postings that have
been submitted since the Optimal List has been reconstituted.  So, you
should be getting 13 such messages.  There is no need for alarm.
=======================================================================

ROA 549-1002

Chinese tone sandhi and prosody

Kent Lee <k-lee7@uiuc.edu>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=549


Abstract:
   Tone sandhi is a common occurrence in different varieties, the most
famous being Mandarin Chinese, in which a third tone (high-low-high, or
falling-rising) followed by another third tone becomes a low-high or
rising tone. Traditional accounts of tonal assimilation are argued
against, in that they fail to account for the specific outcome of the
changed tone, and especially fail when applied to other Chinese dialects
with much more complex tone sandhi phenomena.
   Historical and cross-dialectal data are presented, showing that these
tonal changes seem to preserve archaic tone values and features. The
regular, unchanged tonal values represent the preferred default underlying
representations, while the sandhi (changed tone) values occur only in
specific contexts, namely, in certain tone combinations. These facts, and
the wholly arbitrary values of the sandhi tones, indicate that they are
historical relics and operate in the grammars of modern dialects as
morphophonemic material. Their appearance in restricted contexts can be
accounted for by directional alignment constraints that override other
faithfulness constraints, along with constraints that require faithful
outputs for prosodic heads. A set of such constraints is proposed to
account for Mandarin sandhi. The same kinds of constraints also work in a
non-cyclical form of optimality theory which uses output-output
constraints for more complex forms of sandhi, as shown for Tianjin
dialect.

Keywords: historical phonology, Chinese, sandhi, tone, Mandarin, Tianjin

Areas: Historical Linguistics,Phonology

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=549