The productivity of variable disyllabic tone sandhi in Tianjin Chinese Jie Zhang & Jiang Liu Journal of East Asian Linguistics ISSN 0925-8558 Volume 25 Number 1 J East Asian Linguist (2016) 25:1-35 DOI 10.1007/s10831-015-9135-0 1 23 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science +Business Media Dordrecht. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self- archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com”. 1 23 Author's personal copy J East Asian Linguist (2016) 25:1–35 DOI 10.1007/s10831-015-9135-0 The productivity of variable disyllabic tone sandhi in Tianjin Chinese Jie Zhang1 · Jiang Liu2 Received: 9 January 2013 / Accepted: 23 December 2014 / Published online: 3 November 2015 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 Abstract Tianjin Chinese has one of the more complex tone sandhi systems in Northern Chinese dialects. Due to its close contact with Standard Chinese, many of its tone sandhi patterns are also variable. This article first reports a detailed acoustic study of tone sandhi patterns in both real lexical items and novel words in Tianjin. The data were collected from 48 speakers of Tianjin, who were instructed to pro- nounce disyllabic sequences as real words based on voice prompts. The results showed that the productivity of the sandhis in novel words varied depending on the sandhi—some were less productive than in real words, and some were more pro- ductive, indicating a combination of underlearning, overlearning, and proper learning of the sandhis from the lexicon. A theoretical model that predicts the productivity patterns based on the phonetic properties of the sandhis and statistical generalizations about the sandhis over the lexicon is then proposed. Keywords Tone · Tone sandhi · Tianjin · Productivity · Optimality theory · Maximum entropy grammar Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi: 10.1007/s10831-015-9135-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & Jie Zhang [email protected] & Jiang Liu [email protected] 1 Department of Linguistics, The University of Kansas, 1541 Lilac Lane, Blake Hall, Room 427, Lawrence, KS 66045-3129, USA 2 Department of Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Minnesota, 220 Folwell Hall, 9 Pleasant Street SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA 123 Author's personal copy 2 J. Zhang, J. Liu 1 Introduction 1.1 Two types of evidence for phonological knowledge Kenstowicz and Kisseberth, in Chap. 5 of their seminal Generative phonology: Description and theory (1979), raised a serious methodological issue for generative phonology research: they questioned the assumption that the phonological abstractions derived by traditional research methods that focused on lexically manifested patterns of sound distribution and morpheme alternation were the same abstractions in speakers’ unconscious phonological knowledge—the knowledge that generative phonology aims to uncover. Consequently, they advocated the research practice of complementing the evidence gleaned from such traditional sources with evidence from speakers’ linguistic behavior that directly manifested their uncon- scious knowledge, from speech errors and language games to loanwords and second language acquisition. Their skepticism of the assumption turned out to be well founded as subsequent research showed that speakers know both more and less than the lexical patterns. A number of recent studies have shown that speakers possess phonological knowledge that the lexical patterns of their language do not inform them of—a scenario that we will refer to as “overlearning.” For instance, Zuraw (2007) showed through a corpus study on loans and a web-based survey on novel words that Tagalog speakers possessed knowledge of the splittability of word-initial consonant clusters that could not be deduced from the lexicon. Berent et al. (2007) demonstrated through a series of experiments that English speakers preferred /bd/ as an onset cluster over /lb/, even though neither is a legal onset cluster in English. In an artificial language- learning setting, Wilson (2006) established that when English speakers were presented with velar palatalization before mid vowels, they could extend the process before high vowels but not vice versa. These have been taken as “the poverty of the stimulus” arguments for the relevance of Universal Grammar or substantive biases in phonological learning. “Underlearning,” alternatively termed “the surfeit of the stimulus” (Becker et al. 2011), refers to speakers’ subpar knowledge, and sometimes total ignorance, of generalizable patterns in the lexicon. For example, Becker et al. (2011) found that Turkish speakers could generalize to novel words the statistical patterns seen in relations between an obstruent voicing alternation and word length as well as place of articulation in obstruents in the lexicon, but they were oblivious to a similar statistically significant relation between the voicing alternation and properties of the preceding vowel (height, backness). Hayes et al. (2009b) investigated the variation patterns in suffixal vowel harmony in Hungarian and compared how speakers internalized two types of gradient patterns in novel words—natural ones in which the harmony behavior is based on the properties of the stem vowels (number of triggers, height of the trigger) and unnatural ones in which the harmony is correlated with features of the stem-final consonant. They found that speakers learned both the natural and unnatural patterns, but the unnatural patterns were undervalued and learned less robustly than the natural ones. Using an artificial language-learning 123 Author's personal copy Tone sandhi productivity in Tianjin Chinese 3 paradigm, Moreton (2008) showed that English speakers learned a vowel height- voicing dependency significantly more poorly than a height-height dependency despite the facts that (a) neither dependency is attested in English, (b) the dependency in question was present in the learning experiment, and (c) the two dependencies have comparable phonetic precursors. These results also suggest that speakers’ phonological knowledge is the combined result of learned lexical patterns and a priori knowledge. These studies support Kenstowicz and Kisseberth’s thesis that evidence for speakers’ phonological knowledge needs to come from both within and beyond lexical patterns. Beyond the areas identified by Kenstowicz and Kisseberth such as speech errors and loanwords, corpus-external evidence has emerged from exper- imental investigations of productivity, especially in the form of wug tests (Berko 1958), in which speakers are asked to provide responses to novel words in contexts that are facilitative to the application of the phonological process in question. This methodology has been widely used to test the productivity of phonological alternations (e.g., Albright et al. 2001; Hayes and Londe 2006; Zuraw 2007; Hayes et al. 2009b; Becker et al. 2011) as well as regular and irregular morphological rules (e.g., Bybee and Pardo 1981; Albright 2002; Albright and Hayes 2003; Pierrehumbert 2006). 1.2 The role of productivity in tone sandhi research Tone sandhi research, particularly descriptive work, has had a long tradition in Chinese phonology. Both detailed descriptions of tone sandhi in individual dialects and typological works on cross-linguistic patterns of tone sandhi abound (see Zhang 2014a, b for reviews and references). The relation between tone sandhi and theoretical phonology, however, has been an uncomfortable one. The analysis of Chinese tone sandhi patterns has presented considerable challenges to theoretical phonology in both rule-based and constraint-based frameworks, and complete theoretical analyses of any given tone sandhi system have proven difficult. Beyond the sheer complexity of tone sandhi patterns often observed in Chinese dialects, especially in the Wu and Min groups, three other properties of tone sandhi are responsible for this difficulty. First, as the result of diachronic changes, many of the sandhi patterns in the present-day systems are phonetically arbitrary. This presents particular challenges to the analysis of these patterns in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993), which relies on surface-oriented, generalizable markedness constraints. Second, many of the tone sandhi patterns are phonologically opaque (Kiparsky 1973). For example, in Taiwanese, four of the five tones in the tonal inventory on non-checked syllables are involved in a circular chain shift: 55 → 33 → 21 → 51 → 55 (Cheng 1968; Chen 1987); in Fuzhou, the following synchronic chain shifts are attested: 32 → 44 → 53 → 21 / __ {212, 242}; 44 → 53 → 32 → 24 / __ 32 (Liang and Feng 1996). These patterns also pose analytical challenges for Optimality Theory: circular chain shift has been shown to be incomputable by a “conservative” OT grammar that uses only IO-faithfulness and markedness constraints (Moreton 2004), and regular chain shift requires additional mechanisms