The Avoidance of the Third Tone Sandhi in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

An optimality-theoretic analysis of third tone sandhi (TS)domains of Mandarin is proposed in preference to otherapproaches. This constraint-based analysis provides adescriptively better solution to questions such as why it ispossible for a preposition to resist tone sandhi in certainstructures, a long-standing problem in tone sandhi studies. Thepaper shows that this resistance to tone sandhi is dependent onboth syntactic structures and syntactic categories. In thisstudy, Mandarin tone sandhi domains are related to constituentstrength representations, which are direct mappings of syntacticstructures. An unspecified order of strong/weak values ofconstituent strength for a prepositional phrase is proposed. Todefine a TS domain, several constraints related to metricalfactors, constituent strength, the tone sandhi domain groupingdirection, and output condition are shown to interact with eachother. The optimal tone sandhi domain representation is alwaysthe one which violates the lowest-ranked constraints and violatesany single constraint to the least degree possible, compared toother representations. The avoidance of tone sandhi by anelement, whether it is a preposition or another category, is theresult of interactions of the constraints. The variability ofsurface tone patterns comes from more than one optimal output,from speaking rate or style, and from two possible kinds ofcompetition due to the unspecified constituent strength.