Abstract

Monosyllabic adjectives can undergo double reduplication in Taiwanese to mark intensification. We argue in this paper that the phonological analysis for the tonal patterns of Taiwanese double reduplication relies on three elements: a floating High tone that prefers to dock onto the left edge of the output, tonal correspondence between the two reduplicants, and the lexical listing of the sandhi tones as part of the non-XP-final allomorphs of existing syllables. We support the analysis with an acoustic experiment and a psycholinguistic “wug”-test experiment in Taiwanese, which showed that (a) the floating High tone appears as early as possible in real doubly reduplicated forms; (b) the tonal allomorphy is not productive in non-existing words; and (c) the floating High docking is productive in non-existing words. The analysis echoes the “allomorph selection” hypothesis of Taiwanese tone sandhi by Tsay and Myers (1996) and the “twostage” hypothesis of Taiwanese double reduplication by Myers and Tsay (2001).

Highlights

  • As a widely attested phonological phenomenon in Chinese languages, tone sandhi refers to tonal alternations conditioned by adjacent tones or the prosodic or morpho-syntactic position in which the tone occurs (Chen 2000, among others)

  • To anticipate our analysis and experimental findings, we argue that the derivation of the tonal patterns in double reduplication involves the selection of the appropriate tonal allomorph in non-XP-final positions and the docking of a floating High tone, both of which can be captured Optimality-Theoretically — the former by an APPROPRIATE-ALLOMORPH constraint that enforces the appropriate selection of a listed allomorph in a particular context, the latter by the interaction among constraints that govern the occurrence of floating tones and the correspondence between reduplicants

  • The two aspects of the observed productivity are due to two different aspects of the grammar: the general unproductivity in sandhi tone generation is due to the active lack of this process — the sandhi tone is directly selected by an APPROPRIATE-ALLOMORPH constraint from the lexicon, not generated by constraint interactions; the general productivity of floating High docking, on the other hand, is due to the fact that the behavior of floating High docking is exactly predicted by constraint interactions, which apply to real words and novel words alike

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Summary

Introduction

As a widely attested phonological phenomenon in Chinese languages, tone sandhi refers to tonal alternations conditioned by adjacent tones or the prosodic or morpho-syntactic position in which the tone occurs (Chen 2000, among others). This “tone circle” pattern has been shown by earlier works to be generally unproductive when speakers were “wug”-tested (Berko 1958) with novel words (Hsieh 1970, 1975, 1976, Wang 1993, Zhang et al 2006). Double reduplication has two different patterns: when the base tone is 21 or 51, the two reduplicants both have the sandhi tone from the pattern in (1); but when the base tone is 55, 33, or 24, the first syllable has a rising tone 35, while the second syllable observes the pattern in (1) These reduplicative tonal patterns are summarized in (3). Our analysis is framed in Optimality Theory, it is consistent with the “allomorph selection” hypothesis of Taiwanese tone sandhi by Tsay and Myers (1996) and the “two-stage” hypothesis of Taiwanese double reduplication by Myers and Tsay (2001); the analysis tentatively supports the existence of correspondence relations between reduplicants proposed by Urbanczyk (2001) and Lin (2004)

Constraints and Constraint Interactions
Empirical Predictions of the Phonological Analysis
Acoustic Experiment
Psycholinguistic Wug-Test
Remaining Issues
Findings
Conclusion
Full Text
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