Degenerate Affixes and Templatic Constraints: Rime Change in Chinese

Abstract

This formal study of morphologically induced rime-change (bianyun) phenomena in Chinese argues that rime change is effected by affixation of subsegmental morphemes and that the derived forms are subject to prosodically defined templatic constraints. The Affix Manifestation Principle is proposed to account for the tendency of affix preservation. Various processes are motivated to manifest the effect of affixation and to satisfy the templatic constraints. This study not only shows that one unitary process accounts for different cases of rime change and crossdialectal variation but also has broader theoretical implications regarding the notion of maximality under affixation, the nature of output templates, and the light-heavy distinction within moraic theory