Sandhi Domain Research Articles

On the Distribution of Neutral Tone in Southern Min: LCC and Beyond

The aim of this paper is to address an often-overlooked topic in Southern Min tonology: neutral tone. We show that the tone sandhi domain in Southern Min is not always isomorphic with an XP in syntax or a phonological phrase. In fact, this domain may be smaller than what has been predicted, as evidenced in the phrase-final functional morphemes as well as in the rhythmic effect. We propose that the tone sandhi domain in Southern Min is defined by a constituent Tone Sandhi Domain (TSD, τ) between the p-phrase and the p-word. A TSD is required to bear a final prominence, and only a p-word, mapped from a contentive or focused element in syntax, can be a “prominence-bearing unit.”

Discovering the Prosodic Domain of Aceh Hakka Tone Sandhi

The research investigated the tonal system of the Hakka dialect spoken in the Aceh province of Indonesia. The aim of the research was twofold. First, it retranscribed the dialect’s tonal inventory and provided a comparison with Meixian Hakka and the inventory found in Chen’s (2007) research. Second, it analyzed the Shang Tone Sandhi Rule (STSR) of the dialect and its prosodic domain. The data were collected with a careful design based on the number of syllables, different prosodic structures, and a variety of tonal combinations. The data were collected from two informants, who were female Hakka native speakers that originated from Banda Aceh, Indonesia. The research used mainly an impressionistic approach with some support from Praat Version 6.2.14 to evaluate the pitch of the tones. As for the research’s transcription, the researchers opt for the simpler yet phonologically distinct three-level height system (H, M, L) rather than the five-pitch category of Chao. The research identifies that there are six tonal values in this dialect. The tonal alternation rule, i.e., STSR, operates in a multisyllabic domain, and only the tone at the end of a domain is intact from tonal alternation. The STSR is not sensitive to the syntactic domain c-command relation of the Direct Reference Hypothesis. It also behaves differently compared to the Guangxing dialect Yangping Tone Sandhi Rule. As for prosody, the hierarchical domain of the rule in Aceh Hakka is bounded within the Utterance (U), which is different from the Yinping tone sandhi domain in Meinong Hakka, in which tone sandhi is blocked by the I domain (intonational phrase domain). Therefore, the researchers postulate that the domain for Aceh Hakka Shang tone sandhi lies in the Utterance (U).

Revisiting Tone Sandhi Domain in Xiamen Chinese

The tone sandhi domain in Xiamen Chinese was examined to demonstrate that Match gives a much elegant explanation than Align/Wrap because it allows for subcategorization. MATCHNONMIN and MATCHMAX, when interacting with general MATCHSP, are enough to predict the tone sandhi domain in Xiamen Chinese. Align/Wrap, on the other hand, needs a prosodic well-formedness constraint such as BINARITY to dominate Align/Wrap. Altogether, we take this as a piece of evidence for the richer and fine-grained prosodic subcategorizations.The comparison between Match and Align/Wrap is conducted in the SPOT and the automatic evaluation of all the possible candidates is done in the OTworkplace.

Khoekhoegowab tone sandhi: New experimental evidence

Khoekhoegowab has a tone sandhi process that replaces each underlying tonal melody with an arbitrary secondary melody. This process at first appears to be an unusual example of a "left-dominant" sandhi process in the sense of Yue-Hashimoto (1987) or Zhang (2007). Within a given domain, the leftmost word retains its base from, but the other words undergo paradigmatic substitution; left-dominant systems typically involve spreading of a tonal melody rather than substitution. However, this description of Khoekhoegowab sandhi seems to break down when we consider verbs. Prior descriptions disagree as to whether verb sandhi depends on the placement of a tense-marking clitic (Haacke 1999) or the embedding status of the clause (Brugman 2009). This paper presents the results of a new prosodic production experiment aimed at resolving this conflict. The result is a hybrid generalization: verbs in matrix clauses undergo sandhi when preceded by a tense marker, but verbs in embedded clauses resist sandhi across the board. Thus, Khoekhoegowab continues to look like an exceptional left-dominant system: The verb and tense marking form a sandhi domain in matrix clauses (triggering sandhi on the verb whenever it is not leftmost within that domain), but in embedded clauses verbs form their own independent domain instead.

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

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.

The Language-specific Use of Fundamental Frequency Rise in Segmentation of an Artificial Language: Evidence from Listeners of Taiwanese Southern Min.

Experience with native-language prosody encourages language-specific strategies for speech segmentation. Conflicting findings from previous research suggest that these strategies may not be abstracted away from the acoustic manifestation of prosodic features in the native speech. Using the artificial language learning paradigm, the current study explores this possibility in connection with listeners of a lexical tone language called Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM). In TSM, the only rising lexical tone occurs almost only on the final syllable of the language's tone sandhi domain and is phonetically associated with final lengthening. Based on these observations, Experiment I examined what constituted a sufficient finality cue for use by TSM listeners to support segmentation: (a) final fundamental frequency (F0) rise only; or (b) final F0 rise conjoined with final lengthening. The results showed that segmentation was inhibited by the former cue but facilitated by the latter. Experiment II showed that the facilitation cannot be attributed entirely to final lengthening, as a null effect was found when final lengthening was the sole prosodic cue to segmentation. It is thus assumed that acoustic details as fine-grained as the lengthening of the rising tone are involved in the modulation of the segmentation strategy whereby TSM listeners perceive F0 rise as signaling finality. The inhibitory effect of final F0 rise alone found in Experiment I motivated Experiment III, which revealed that initial F0 rise in the absence of lengthening cues improved TSM listeners' segmentation. It is speculated that such use of initial F0 rise might reflect a cross-linguistic segmentation solution.

The phonological status of Low tones in Shanghai tone sandhi

Abstract In Shanghai tone sandhi, with the exception of T5 (yangru) sandhi, a pitch-fall occurs at the second or third syllable of a phonological word (or a sandhi domain). Previous analyses argue that this is invoked by the insertion of a default Low tone to satisfy the Well-formedness Condition of the autosegmental theory. However, in the framework of the present autosegmental theory, that condition is no longer necessarily satisfied, and an alternative interpretation, adopting a boundary Low tone, has been suggested. To evaluate the appropriateness of the default and boundary interpretations, we compared pitch contours among di- to tetrasyllabic words in greater detail. The results show that, in T1 to T4 sandhi, disyllabic words tend to have lower pitch contours than tri- and tetrasyllabic words at the first and second syllables, and that, in tetrasyllables, minimum pitch values were constantly attested at the third syllable. These results indicate that in Shanghai tone sandhi, a boundary Low tone is assigned at the right edge of a phonological word, and it is further associated with the third syllable in tetrasyllables. This boundary interpretation further gives an appropriate explanation of the difference of the pitch-fall between Middle and New Shanghai.

Priming the representation of left-dominant sandhi words: A Shanghai dialect case study

This study examines how the acoustic input (the surface form) and the abstract linguistic representation (the underlying representation) interact during spoken word recognition by investigating left-dominant tone sandhi, a tonal alternation in which the underlying tone of the first syllable spreads to the sandhi domain. We conducted an auditory-auditory priming lexical decision experiment on Shanghai left-dominant sandhi words, in which each disyllabic target ([tɕi55 dɛ31] “egg”) was preceded by monosyllabic primes either sharing the same underlying tone ([tɕi55]), surface tone ([tɕi53] “machine”), or being unrelated to the tone of the first syllable of the sandhi targets ([tɕi24] “to remember”). Results showed a surface priming effect, but not an underlying priming effect. Moreover, the surface priming did not interact with speakers’ familiarity ratings to the sandhi targets. The results are discussed in the context of how phonological opacity, productivity, and the directionality of tone sandhi patterns influence the representation of tone sandhi words as well as how the lexicality of the primes and the participants’ usage pattern of Shanghai may have influenced the results.

Tone sandhi of young Taiwanese speakers

This paper addresses young Taiwanese speakers’ tone sandhi. A young speaker’s language is often a mixture of Taiwanese and Mandarin; though understanding Taiwanese, he/she frequently responds in Mandarin. This paper establishes a corpus of ‘young Taiwanese’, which reveals three different tone sandhi patterns from ‘general Taiwanese’. First, a j-break (sandhi domain break) may occur after a Xhead. Second, a j-break may occur after an adjunct XP. Finally, a j is restricted within three syllables. Young speakers seldom speak long Taiwanese expressions; they tend to break a long string into short fragments and match them with smaller syntactic or prosodic junctures.

Pattern substitution in Wuxi tone sandhi and its implication for phonological learning

Tone sandhi in Wuxi Chinese involves “pattern substitution,” whereby the base tone on the first syllable is first substituted by another tone, then spread to the sandhi domain. We conducted a wug test to investigate native Wuxi speakers’ tacit knowledge of tone sandhi and found that the substituion aspect of the sandhi is not fully productive, but the extension aspect is, and sandhi productivity is influenced by the phonetic similarity between base and sandhi tones. These results are discussed in the context of how phonological opacity, phonetic naturalness, and lexical frequency influence phonological learning, and a grammatical learning model that can predict Wuxi speakers’ experimental behavior is proposed.

Perceived prosodic boundaries in Taiwanese and Swedish

Earlier studies have shown that listeners are not only able to detect the presence or the absence of a prosodic boundary but also able to distinguish between different boundary types. This study examined whether Taiwanese listeners (n = 18) and English listeners (n = 7) were able to predict the occurrence and the strength of the upcoming prosodic boundaries in Taiwanese and Swedish. For this purpose, we conducted a perceptual rating experiment, whose stimuli consisted of fragments with different boundaries (word, phonological phrase/tone sandhi domain, and intonational phrase), length (2-second and one-word) and quality (low-pass filtered and unfiltered.) Results show that both Taiwanese and English listeners can detect the occurrence and distinguish the boundaries in a foreign language when they are presented with longer fragments. Our finding strengthens the notion proposed in Carlson et al. (2005) that lexical information is not a necessary cue for prosodic boundary detection Another supporting evidence is that they could do the task nearly as well when the utterances were low-pass filtered. Significant correlations between ratings and the following relevant measures are found: f0 and voice quality.

CONSTRUCTION SENSITIVITY IN PINGYAO TONE SANDHI

This paper investigates tone sandhi phenomena in Pingyao, a Jin dialect spoken in Shanxi province in China. Pingyao tone sandhi is special in that tone sandhi in bi-syllabic strings is construction sensitive, but tone sandhi in tri-syllabic strings is not fully conditioned by construction types. Based on Optimality Theory (OT), this paper proposes analyses for bi-tonal and tri-tonal sandhi in Pingyao. We show that while bi-tonal sandhi can be accounted for by assuming that there are different grammars associated with different construction types, the lack of construction sensitivity in certain tri-syllabic strings suggests that the association between construction types and phonological grammars can be sacrificed to comply with a higher demand. In Pingyao, the higher demand is to avoid having a tri-tonal string with marked tone sandhi domain from being associated with conflicting grammars.

How does phonology guide phonetics in segment– f0 interaction?

The phonetics and phonology of consonant– f0 interaction in Shanghai Chinese were examined to further refine our understanding of consonant– f0 interaction in general. Bi-syllabic nouns, which form tone sandhi domains, were elicited within template sentences. These nouns vary in (1) lexical tone of the sandhi domain-initial syllable; (2) laryngeal contrast in the stop onset of the second syllable; and (3) discourse context (i.e., with focus vs. without focus). Results suggest that the interaction of stop onset and f0 in the sandhi domain non-initial syllables in Shanghai Chinese cannot be just attributed to the phonetic implementation of the phonological feature contrast in the language (as suggested by the tone–consonant co-occurrence pattern in tone sandhi domain-initial position), nor can it be due to purely automatic results of consonant production. Rather, the observed f0 perturbation pattern suggests the interaction of both effects. Speakers do voluntarily control their articulatory settings, at least to some extent, so as to enhance the stop contrast. Such voluntary control of articulation is dependent on both tonal and discourse context. Furthermore, complex laryngeal settings, which may not condition categorical co-occurrence patterns between tone and consonant, can nevertheless determine in part patterns of consonant– f0 interaction in the language. Our results also have implications for consonant feature specifications and their phonetic implication in general.

A directional asymmetry in Chinese tone sandhi systems

Chinese tone sandhi systems are often classified as left-dominant or right-dominant depending on the position of the syllable retaining the citation tone. An asymmetry exists between the two types of systems: left-dominant sandhi often involves rightward extension of the initial tone to the entire sandhi domain; right-dominant sandhi, however, often involves default insertion and paradigmatic neutralization of nonfinal tones. I argue that the extension of a tone to a larger domain may serve two markedness purposes: the reduction of tonal contours on a syllable and the reduction of pitch differences across syllable boundaries, both of which have a rightward directionality preference. The former is due to the durational advantage afforded by final lengthening; the latter is due to the universal preference for progressive tonal coarticulation. I show that a theory that formally encodes these preferences via intrinsic constraint rankings can predict the directional asymmetry noted above.

An Optimality Account of the Variability of the Third Tone Sandhi Domain in Mandarin

An Optimality Account of the Variability of the Third Tone Sandhi Domain in Mandarin

The Avoidance of the Third Tone Sandhi in Mandarin Chinese

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.

Contour-tone spreading and tone sandhi in Danyang Chinese

An important contribution to our knowledge of tone sandhi among the Chinese dialects is Lü's (1980) article on the tones and tone sandhi behaviour of Danyang, a Wu dialect of Chinese. Lü's description of Danyang is, to date, our only source on the dialect. While it is a northern Wu dialect, the tone sandhi patterning in Danyang differs from Shanghai, Suzhou, Wuxi and other dialects in the vicinity. There are a number of interesting problems related to tone in the dialect. This paper restricts the topic to only one of these problems, namely the treatment of the six basic tone patterns in Danyang, focusing in particular on the pattern in which a contour tone is copied Onto adjacent syllables in the tone sandhi domain.

Wuxi tone sandhi from last to first syllable dominance

Abstract Wuxi is a Northern Wu dialect of Chinese spoken in Wuxi district, the administrative center of which is Wuxi City, located about thirty miles northwest of Suzhou, and another fifty miles further from Shanghai. The Wuxi dialect exhibits some interesting behaviour with respect to its tone sandhi patterning that has not been reported in the literature. [1] The dialect has two strategies for tone sandhi patterning — pattern extension and pattern substitution — both of which involve the first syllable as “dominant”, as determining the tone patterning in the sandhi span (Yue-Hashimoto 1980). Pattern extension simply involves taking the tone melody that was on the first syllable and extending that pattern onto the entire tone sandhi span. Pattern substitution requires one additional step before the tone-spreading; namely, the replacement of the tone melody on the first syllable with a new melody before its spread onto the tone sandhi domain.