Trisyllabic tone sandhi in the Changting Hakka dialect
长汀客家方言的三字组变调
Hui-chuan Hsu 许慧娟
Abstract 摘要
"This paper centers around trisyllabic tone sandhi in the Changting Hakka dialect. Many potential solutions will be shown to be unable to explain the data, including modes of rule application, rule relations, and polysyllabic tone sandhi rules. Instead, the complex tone sandhi phenomena in Changting result from the satisfaction and interaction of four constraints, namely the One Step Principle, Tonotactics, Temporal Sequence, and Set Consistency. The One Step Principle prohibits further change of a derived tone. Tonotactics is a well-formedness condition filtering out surface structures with a possible input to tone sandhi. Both the One Step Principle and Tonotactics can predict the directionality of rule application. If there is a conflict, the One Step Principle wins out. Temporal Sequence, which indicates that the default mode of rule application is iterative from left to right, comes into play in cases where the One Step Principle and Tonotactics do not get involved. Set Consistency specifies that trisyllabic strings with the same first two underlying tones share one directionality of rule application. The One Step Principle as a derivational constraint finds a piece of supporting evidence from the Huojia dialect. More interestingly, there exists a discrepancy between tonal and segmental derivation with respect to the One Step Principle in that a segment can undergo phonological rules again and again as long as their structural description is met. This discrepancy invokes some further questions, such as the theoretical motivation behind the difference between tonal and segmental derivation, and the possible cognitive basis for the One Step Principle. As well-known, African tone languages behave quite differently from Chinese dialects in the nature of
tone sandhi. The issue of whether the One Step Principle holds in African tone languages is left open for future research."
Journal of Chinese Linguistics volume 23 (ISSN 0091-3723)
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