Prosodic morphology in four Chinese dialects

Abstract

Yanggu, Anxiang and Yuanyang diminutives and Cantonese familiar name formation are examined in the light of recent advances in our understanding of the role of prosodic categories (mora, syllable foot) in phonology and morphology. Evidence is given for the role played by the bi-moraic syllable and the iambic foot as output templates, and for the syllable as a target for truncation. The Yanggu data also argues for extending the notion of Prosodic Licensing to the featural level, and supports the claim that both laterals and front vowels have Coronal nodes. These results, drawn from a language family whose prosodic phenomena (other than tone) are not at first glance very rich, lend strong support to the growing body of research in prosodic morphology, in particular to the pioneering work of McCarthy and Prince (1986, 1990). Chinese dialects tend to show little traditional evidence for prosodic structure. The syllable is largely co-extensive with the morpheme, and resyllabification is very limited. Many dialects (e.g. Cantonese) lack noticeable stress, so the metrical foot is well-concealed. Despite this, the units and principles of prosody play a role even in Chinese, suggesting that these notions are indeed part of the primitive set made available by Universal Grammar.