Abstract
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 prosodic structure. The various possible sandhi patterns for a right-branching expression and the non-alternating sandhi pattern for a left-branching expression are derived when T3S applies cyclically bottom-up on the proposed prosodic structures.
Highlights
Mandarin (Chinese) is a tonal language with four distinctive tones: T1, T2, T3, and T4
T3 Sandhi (T3S) is a phonological process by which a T3 is changed into a sandhi tone (s), which has the phonological characteristics of T2, when it is followed by another T3; according to Yip (1980, 2002), it is a dissimilatory process where a H tone is inserted between two L tones, as schematized in (2) and illustrated by the expression in (3)
Cheng (1970, 1973), among others, observes a left-/right-branching asymmetry in T3S: 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, as in (5a) and (6a)
Summary
Mandarin (Chinese) is a tonal language with four distinctive tones: T1, T2, T3, and T4. Cheng (1970, 1973), among others, observes a left-/right-branching asymmetry in T3S: 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, as in (5a) and (6a). The rest of the paper is organized as follows: in section 2, I present evidence that T3S is a cyclic process and that T3S applies on a prosodic structure distinct from the syntactic structure of an expression; in section 3, I propose a Match-Theory analysis of the left-/right-branching asymmetry in T3S; section 4 provides an OT analysis of the T3S process that is compatible with the prosodic structures proposed in section 3; section 5 concludes
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