X-Slots, Feature Trees, and the Chinese Sound Inventory: A Twenty-First Century Take on Mandarin Phonological Structure

Abstract

San Duanmu's Phonology of Standard Chinese is the first book-length English-language treatise on the synchronic sound system of Mandarin Chinese in twenty years. The author incorporates linguistic theories developed since the 1970s, such as autosegmental phonology, feature geometry, and optimality theory, to give an updated and much more accurate account of the segmental and suprasegmental units of Standard Chinese, while at the same time constructing an original model of stress, tone, and syllable structure. He provides in the process unique insights to age-old controversies such as missing combinations in the Mandarin syllabary, the nature of the Mandarin third tone and Tone 3 Sandhi, and why Chinese morphology is sensitive to the number of syllables in an expression. Duanmu's work is a marriage of Western phonetic/phonological science and Chinese laboratory and survey data - one that constitutes a substantial advance in our understanding of the structure of Modern Standard Chinese.