OCP Avoidance in Classical Chinese: Implications for Tonogenesis

Jack Isaac Rabinovitch

doi:10.3765/amp.v9i0.4917

Abstract

Through a corpus of five pre-Qin (before 221 BCE) texts, this paper argues that the authors of both prose and poetry in Classical Chinese were sensitive to OCP violations at cross-word boundaries, and changed diction and used marked word order as a way to avoid the creation of pseudogeminates across words. The frequency of bigrams which result in pseudogeminates are compared to the predicted frequency of pseudogeminates across the corpus. This paper finds that pseudogeminates are significantly (p<0.00001) rarer than expected through randomization. Furthermore, by analyzing these texts with multiple possible phonological reconstructions, this paper suggests that post-codas, segments which were present in Old Chinese, but were elided during the process of tonogenesis between Old Chinese and Middle Chinese, were most likely present in the Chinese of the writers of the texts. Evidence comes from the consistency of OCP avoidance across all tones of Chinese assuming the presence of post-codas, and the lack of consistency thereof when post-codas are not assumed.

Highlights

Historical reconstructions of Chinese are often divided into two periods: Middle Chinese, which maintains tonal contrasts, an aspect of all modern Chinese dialects, and Old Chinese, which is reconstructed as a toneless language with so-called ‘post-codas’
This paper considers three hypotheses regarding the state of tonogenesis for the analyzed works: 1) the Atonal Hypothesis, where post-codas were present during the time that these works were written and should influence Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) restrictions, 2) the Tonal Hypothesis, where post-codas were not present and so would not impact OCP constraint violations, and 3) the Non-Glottal Hypothesis, where post-codas were present but where glottal stop post-codas do not affect OCP constraint violations
This paper finds that violations of the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) are avoided in Classical Chinese, and suggests that the OCP may have influenced writers’ decisions in using marked word order or choice as a way to avoid forming pseudogeminates across characters

Summary

Introduction

Historical reconstructions of Chinese are often divided into two periods: Middle Chinese, which maintains tonal contrasts, an aspect of all modern Chinese dialects, and Old Chinese, which is reconstructed as a toneless language with so-called ‘post-codas’. I find that across all texts, under any of the three hypotheses, OCP violations are significantly avoided in both poetry and prose; only under the Atonal and Non-Glottal Hypotheses are OCP violations avoided among bigrams which would have historically had an intervening post-coda segment This suggests that at the time of the writing of the texts in the corpus, post-coda segments were still present in Chinese. The Art of War (孫子兵法 Sūnzi Bīngfǎ, hereafter abbreviated AoW) is a military and philosophical treatise dating from the 5th century BCE, during the Spring and Autumn period (776 – 471 BCE) All of these texts were provided by Sturgeon (2019)’s Chinese Text Project. Following Shen (2020)’s standard, Zhèngzhāng (2003)’s reconstructions are considered ‘half reconstructions’, as they are phonetic reflections of known categorial differences, and are not written with an asterisk

Reconstruction and Tonogenesis

The OCP and Capturing Sound Change

Finding Pseudogeminates

Testing for OCP Violation Avoidance

Conclusion