The diachrony of East Asian prosodic templates

Abstract

AbstractTypical words in some East Asian languages, including Chinese, have reduced historically from disyllabic (CV·CV(C)) to monosyllabic (C(C)V(C)) and then open monosyllables (CV). More recently, in some of those languages, many monosyllabic CV forms again appear as disyllabic (CV·CV). The former developments result from a variety of apparently unconnected segmental changes. In the latter, they often reflect morphological innovations, like compounding and affixation. That is, apparently disparate segmental phonological processes reduced monosyllabic word templates and apparently disparate morphological and phonological processes have created new disyllables, which can all be captured in terms of preferred prosodic templates. We integrate these areal and genetic patterns into a growing literature on prosodic templates in diachrony, expanding the set of languages and patterns. That body of work has focused on sound changes that bring words into alignment with templates while our cases studies also involve clear changes in the templatic structures themselves. Finally, the patterns reviewed here resemble cycles of prosodic change, driven by tensions between reduction and minimal word constraints; we suggest that these phenomena show ‘bare’ prosodic cyclicity without the grammatical or functional ramifications of familiar cycles of change.