Abstract
Despite various work which aimed to identify the phonetic and structural underpinning of tone sandhi directionality, the underlying mechanism that governs tone sandhi remains unknown. We note that the two widely discussed properties of tone sandhi, their phonetic grounds and directionality, correspond to two types of cognitive biases widely investigated in segmental phonology, namely substantive bias and structural bias respectively. This study examines structural simplicity and phonetic naturalness of tone sandhi patterns across seventeen Chinese varieties. Based on a structure-based analysis, we show that tone sandhi patterns are overwhelmingly uni-directional (i.e. structurally simple) either throughout a sandhi system or within each grammatical category. Crucially, uni-directionality is largely right-dominant, which could be attributed to its phonetic grounding. We argue that structural simplicity grounded on phonetic substance better captures tone sandhi asymmetries and such phonetically-grounded structural simplicity bias is reflected in the asymmetries of Chinese tone sandhi directionality.
Highlights
Tone sandhi refers to the alternation of phonetic tone shape conditioned by adjacent tones or by prosodic or morphosyntactic position (Chen, 2000)
The following considerations on phonetic grounds of tone sandhi directionality will show that right-dominant local substitutions are preferred in terms of phonetic naturalness over left-dominant ones
The uni-directional systems are largely right-dominant, which could be attributed to phonetic motivations that the left contour tone is under a greater durational pressure to be substituted and the left tone in general is perceptually motivated to be changed
Summary
Tone sandhi refers to the alternation of phonetic tone shape conditioned by adjacent tones or by prosodic or morphosyntactic position (Chen, 2000). Despite its partial success in accounting for some tone sandhi patterns, whether relying on durational components (Zhang & Lai, 2010; Zhang & Liu, 2016) or the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) (Chen, 2000), phonetic-based analysis is not sufficient to account for the whole picture of Chinese tone sandhi system (Zhang, 2014) Another tone sandhi property that has been widely examined along with its phonetic grounds is a structural property of tone sandhi, namely tone sandhi directionality (Chen, 2000; Zhang, 2007).
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