Tonal chain-shifts as anti-neutralization-induced tone sandhi (original) (raw)
Related papers
THE AVOIDANCE OF THE THIRD TONE SANDHI IN MANDARIN CHINESE
Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 1997
An optimality-theoretic analysis of third tone sandhi (TS) domains of Mandarin is proposed in preference to other approaches. This constraint-based analysis provides a descriptively better solution to questions such as why it is possible for a preposition to resist tone sandhi in certain structures, a long-standing problem in tone sandhi studies. The paper shows that this resistance to tone sandhi is dependent on both syntactic structures and syntactic categories. In this study, Mandarin tone sandhi domains are related to constituent strength representations, which are direct mappings of syntactic structures. An unspecified order of strong/weak values of constituent strength for a prepositional phrase is proposed. To define a TS domain, several constraints related to metrical factors, constituent strength, the tone sandhi domain grouping direction, and output condition are shown to interact with each other. The optimal tone sandhi domain representation is always the one which violates the lowest-ranked constraints and violates any single constraint to the least degree possible, compared to other representations. The avoidance of tone sandhi by an element, whether it is a preposition or another category, is the result of interactions of the constraints. The variability of surface tone patterns comes from more than one optimal output, from speaking rate or style, and from two possible kinds of competition due to the unspecified constituent strength.
Proceedings of Speech Prosody, 2024
Nonce-probe test has been extensively used to investigate the productivity of tone sandhi. The nonce words used in previous studies on Xiamen tone sandhi were usually disyllabic wug words with accidental gap syllables. This study aims at isolating the effect of phonotactic constraints by investigating the application of Xiamen tone sandhi to both (1) disyllabic semi-wug words made up of real syllables and (2) disyllabic wug words consisting of one accidental-gap syllable and one real syllable. Picture-naming tasks were used to elicit the production of these conditions from children, teenagers, middle-aged adults and older speakers. The results showed that Xiamen tone sandhi was highly productive for semi-wug words but far less productive for wug words. Children and teenagers made some errors in applying the correct tone sandhi rules to real and semi-wug words, while their accuracy of applying tone sandhi to wug words was very similar to those of the middle-aged and older speakers. It is concluded that Xiamen tone sandhi is highly productive in phonotactically well-formed real syllables but less productive in phonotactically ill-formed syllables.
Mechanisms of tone sandhi rule application by tonal and non-tonal non-native speakers
Speech Communication, 2019
This study is the first comprehensive acoustic study to examine the acquisition of two Mandarin tone sandhi rules: the third tone sandhi and the more phonetically motivated, half-third sandhi rule by both tonal (Cantonese) and non-tonal (American English) speakers using a Wug Test. Participants were asked to form disyllables from two monosyllabic morphemes. To test for the operation of the lexical versus the computation mechanisms in sandhi rule application, both real and various types of wug (nonsense) morphemes were included. Functional data analysis revealed that Cantonese and American speakers apply the two rules similarly on both real words and wug words, suggesting that the sandhi forms are stored as part of the representation of the abstract Tone 3 (T3) category, and computation of allophonic variants is likely to be involved during production. However, in their computation of tone sandhi rules, L2 learners showed less detailed and less accurate production of tonal contours compared to native speakers, due, perhaps, to less detailed phonological representations of allophonic variants. In general, Cantonese speakers performed better than American speakers. Perceptual mapping between Mandarin sandhi T3 to existing Cantonese tone categories may be responsible for the observed pitch contours among Cantonese speakers. Finally, no phonetic bias was found in the application of the two sandhi rules among these groups of L2 learners, which is likely due to more variability in L2's speech, obscuring any differences that may exist.
Preservation of Tone in Right-Dominant Tone Sandhi : A Fragment of
2016
Impressionistic and acoustic data are presented for the nine citation tones, and a small part of the disyllabic tone sandhi, of a speaker of the previously undescribed Chinese dialect of Maodian from the Wuzhou subgroup of Wu The data are used to refine the typology of the apparent rightdominant tone sandhi characteristic of the southern Wu and Min area. It is shown that not all word-final tones are the same as citation tones; and that therefore preservation of word-final tones cannot be criterial for right-dominance.
Morpho-Syntactic Effects on Tone Sandhi Variants in Shanghai Chinese
Gengo Kenkyu (Journal of the Linguistic Society of Japan), 2015
This paper examines effects of morpho-syntax on tone sandhi variants in Shanghai Chinese. In Shanghai Chinese, " (broad) tone sandhi " occurs in a polysyllabic phrase in which the overall pitch of the phrase is solely determined by the tone of the initial syllable. When this rule applies to a quadrisyllabic phrase whose initial tone is T5 (yangru), two sandhi variants appear that differ in their tonal representations. Previous work has suggested several interpretations of the relationship between the sandhi variants but they have not been supported by any objective data. This study closely observes the distribution of sandhi variants in Shanghai Chinese from a morpho-syntactic perspective. The investigation reveals the following two findings: 1) Three, not two, sandhi variants are found; and 2) two of these sandhi variants (" Second Association " and the " 2+2 Variant ") occur only in compounds that consist of two disyllabic nouns (" 2+2 compounds "). The second finding clearly indicates that the distribution of the sandhi variants is affected by the morpho-syntactic structures of the phrases. This paper further discusses why two of the sandhi variants occur only in 2+2 compounds. The occurrence of the 2+2 Variant can be attributed to the difference of a foot (or sandhi domain) construction among the morpho-syntactic structures, and the occurrence of Second Association can be explained by the historical relationship among the sandhi variants.
Mechanisms of Tone Sandhi Rule Application by Non-Native Speakers
Interspeech 2017
This study is the first to examine acquisition of two Mandarin tone sandhi rules by Cantonese speakers. It designs both real and different types of wug words to test whether learners may exploit a lexical or computation mechanism in tone sandhi rule application. We also statistically compared their speech production with Beijing Mandarin speakers. The results of functional data analysis showed that non-native speakers applied tone sandhi rules both to real and wug words in a similar manner, indicating that they might utilize a computation mechanism and compute the rules under phonological conditions. No significant differences in applying these two phonological rules on reading wug words also suggest no bias in the application of these two rules. However, their speech production differed from native speakers. The application of third tone sandhi rule was more categorical than native speakers in that Cantonese speakers tended to neutralize the sandhi Tone 3 more with Tone 2 produced in isolation compared to native speakers. Also, Cantonese speakers might not have applied half-third tone sandhi rule fully since they tended to raise f0 values more at the end of vowels.
Tonal chain shifts in Taiwanese: a comparative markedness approach
Capturing, 2015
This paper discusses tonal chain shifts in Taiwanese from the perspective of comparative markedness. The tone circle in this language considers old tone markedness violations more serious than new tone markedness violations. This is referred to as "anti-grandfathering effects," which motivate the circular chain shifts. This paper also argues for local conjunction to work with comparative markedness; new tone markedness constraints are locally conjoined with tone feature faithfulness constraints. The WOW (worst-of-the-worst) effects provide a direction for the tone circle. The employment of comparative markedness offers a fresh angle from which to examine tone sandhi across Chinese dialects, and makes antifaithfulness and contrast preservation dispensable.
On the Left-/Right-Branching Asymmetry in Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi
Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology
In Mandarin, a left-/right-branching asymmetry is observed when the Tone 3 Sandhi (T3S) process interacts with the syntactic structure of an expression: while expressions that have a left-branching syntactic structure only have a non-alternating sandhi pattern in which all but the rightmost T3 is changed to the sandhi tone, for expressions that have a right-branching syntactic structure various sandhi patterns are possible. This paper proposes that T3S applies cyclically bottom-up on a prosodic structure matched from the syntactic structure of an expression, along the lines of the Match Theory of syntactic-prosodic constituency correspondence (Selkirk 2011). The interaction of Match Phrase constraints and Strong Strong Start, which is a more restricted version of Selkirk’s (2011) Strong Start constraint, predicts that different prosodic structures are possible outputs for a right-branching expression, while for a left-branching expression the only possible output is a left-branching...
Relational Correspondence In Tone Sandhi
2007
This dissertation proposes that the constraint component of OT grammars should be expanded to include a family of faithfulness constraints that evaluate input-output/output-output mappings for the preservation of gross Fo contours (rising, falling, level) across two or more segments. Following Steriade (2006), I refer to constraints in this family as Relational Correspondence constraints. The central tenet of Relational Correspondence is that phonological processes are shaped by pressure to maintain perceptual similarity between correspondent relations between successive elements, or syntagmatic contrast preservation in the auditory domain Fo, as opposed to paradigmatic contrast preservation according to which the well-formedness of an entity is evaluated with reference to the set of entities it contrasts with. Two types of Relational Correspondence are distinguished in this work: Contour and Slope Correspondence. Contour Correspondence, formulated as RELCORR constraints, assesses correspondence of the phonological height (Fo scaling) relation between successive tones. Four height relations are proposed for the tonal contour: "greater than" (x>y), "less than" (x<y), "equal to" (x=y), and "non-equal to" (xey). Preservation of the four scaling relations is contextualized with respect to different degrees of cohesiveness: nucleus-internal, word-internal and across words. Slope Correspondence, formulated as MATCH-SLOPE constraints, requires preservation of the steepness of the Fo contour across successive tones. Relational correspondence provides a unifying account for a number of seemingly unrelated tone sandhi phenomena in genetically diverse languages, while explaining empirical facts that cannot be adequately expressed within the standard Correspondence Theory of faithfulness plus markedness constraints.