Tone Sandhi Domain is not a Foot in Standard Mandarin: Evidence from the Perceptual Side

Naiyan Du

doi:10.3765/amp.v9i0.4888

Abstract

There is a long debate on whether or not the tone sandhi domain in Standard Mandarin should be treated as a metrical foot. According to the hypothesis that the tone sandhi domain is the metrical foot (Duanmu, 2007), a tone sandhi pattern can be used to infer the position of stress. However, this study shows that, despite changing the domain over which tone sandhi occurs, stress pattern remains unchanged perceptually for native speakers of Standard Mandarin. This finding conforms to the results of previous production experiments that show that the stress position remains consistent for utterances with different morpho-syntactic structures (Jia, 2011; Lai et al., 2010). Therefore, the tone sandhi domain is non-isomorphic with the stress domain in Standard Mandarin.

Highlights

(1) Non-Head Stress In the syntactic structure [X XP], where X is the syntactic head and XP, the syntactic nonhead, XP should be stressed
Despite its complexity of this model and many theoretical problems with it, this theory offers an elegant explanation for why utterances that have the same syntactic structure can have different tone sandhi domain patterns at the post-lexical level
The perceptual study by Jia (2011) shows that native speakers perceive the first syllable to be more stressed in both groups

Summary

Introduction

(1) Non-Head Stress In the syntactic structure [X XP] (or [XP X]), where X is the syntactic head and XP, the syntactic nonhead, XP should be stressed. The rationale behind the non-head stress theory is information structure. Since there are more options choosing modifiers (non-head) than choosing head, modifiers carry more information, and should be stressed according to information-stress principle by Duanmu (2007). This theory is successful in accounting for tone sandhi patterns. The stress should fall on the first syllable of modifier for the former group and fall on the second syllable of object for the second group according to Non-Head Stress by Duanmu. The perceptual study by Jia (2011) shows that native speakers perceive the first syllable to be more stressed in both groups

Methods

Results

Conclusion