CHINESE TONE SANDHI and PROSODY KENT A. LEE University
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CHINESE TONE SANDHI AND PROSODY KENT A. LEE University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Urbana, Illinois Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to thank Hans Henrich Hock, for this guidance and advice on this project. I would also like to thank Jerome Packard (East Asian Department) and Dan Silverman for reviewing and input, Charles Kisseberth and Jennifer Cole for training in OT, and to various other faculty and staff members in the Linguistics Dept. I am indebted to my wife, Hoon Daisy Kim, to whom this work is dedicated. This paper is a slightly revised version of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Linguistics in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1997; revised Oct. 2002. I welcome comments and suggestions for revisions and improvements via email at [email protected], or [email protected]. Kent Lee 2 Table of Contents 0. Abstract ..................................................................................................................................5 0. Preface....................................................................................................................................6 1. General characteristics of chinese tone..................................................................................8 Introduction ...................................................................................................................8 Tonal features.................................................................................................................8 Yin-yang register split .................................................................................................11 Sandhi patterns ............................................................................................................12 2. Previous accounts of sandhi ................................................................................................15 Mandarin tone sandhi ..................................................................................................15 Cantonese sandhi .........................................................................................................18 Tianjin sandhi ..............................................................................................................19 Sandhi in other dialects ...............................................................................................26 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................28 3. Prosodic domains of sandhi .................................................................................................29 Minnan and Mandarin .................................................................................................30 Headedness ..................................................................................................................36 Headedness in sandhi ...................................................................................................39 Prosody ........................................................................................................................42 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................43 4. Sandhi in historical perspective ...........................................................................................44 Ancient origins of the tone system ..............................................................................44 Tonal merger ................................................................................................................48 Other historical origins of sandhi ................................................................................51 Sandhi, reversal, and stress ..........................................................................................52 Tone chain shifts ..........................................................................................................55 Other historical examples ............................................................................................58 Historical domains .......................................................................................................62 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................64 3 5. Tone and morphophonology ................................................................................................66 Derivational morphology .............................................................................................67 Tonal morphosyntax ....................................................................................................73 Tonal morphophonology .............................................................................................76 Tianjin revisited ...........................................................................................................79 6. Prosody and final considerations .........................................................................................86 Prosody ........................................................................................................................86 Final considerations and theoretical issues..................................................................91 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................94 Appendix: Tone values across Chinese dialects .....................................................................96 References .............................................................................................................................109 4 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 output constraints, including constraints that require faithful outputs for prosodic heads. An analysis of constraints is demonstrated with a non-cyclical form of optimality theory for sandhi in Mandarin and Tianjin dialects. 5 Preface This thesis examines the problem that tone sandhi in Chinese dialects presents for phonological analysis. Synchronic analyses that have been proposed, including some commonly accepted proposals, will be shown to have considerable shortcomings. Both derivational and optimality theoretic approaches will be examined, from which it will be seen that purely synchronic, phonological accounts are unsatisfying. Some of the more significant insights come from historical phonology, where evidence suggests that sandhi forms could be, among other things, remnants of earlier tonal values. I posit that sandhi could have been conditioned by changes since the yin-yang register split of Old Mandarin, especially tone shifting, register reversal, and other realignments or changes in tonal systems across the dialects. Sandhi could be better analyzed as a mechanism of preserving earlier tonal values and contrasts in the synchronic grammar, most likely as a separate tonal morpheme that surfaces and imposes itself in tonal combinations. I will consider other, possibly more promising, avenues to analyzing sandhi, namely in diachronic and morphological aspects as alternatives to the standard treatments which rely solely on synchronic phonology. I will argue that historical and morphophonological approaches seem more promising and should be researched further. I will also show that an optimality theoretic analysis can work for sandhi if morphology is taken into account. Thus, I will try to show that synchronic morphophonological accounts or historical phonological accounts of sandhi will be preferable to the standard accounts already put forth. Chapter one examines the basic properties and historical background of Chinese tonality, and the basic problems posed by sandhi. Previous synchronic accounts, both derivational and 6 optimality theoretic, of Mandarin, Cantonese, and Tianjin will be examined in chapter two. Chapter three examines the types of domains over which sandhi and other related tonal phenomena apply; the relationship between morphosyntactic domains, phonological domains, and sandhi domains; and the prosodic structure of sandhi domains. Chapter four examines and evaluates possible diachronic explanations for sandhi, such as tonal merger, chain shifts, flip-flop, and register reversal. Chapter five explores tonal morphophonology, the plausibility