Phonology of Chinese

Oxford University Press

The Phonology of Standard Chinese



CONTENTS

Notes on Transcription xi

Features, Abbreviations, and Symbols xiii

Prefaces xv

1. INTRODUCTION 1

1.1. Chinese, its speakers, and its dialects 1

1.2. History 2

1.3. Standard Chinese 4

1.3.1. Standard Spoken Chinese 4

1.3.2. Alphabetical writing and Pinyin 5

1.3.3. Vernacular writing 6

1.4. Phonological literature on Standard Chinese 6

1.5. Goals of this book 8

2. THE SOUND INVENTORY 9

2.1. What is a sound? 9

2.2. Phonemics 10

2.2.1. The minimal pair 10

2.2.2. Complementary distribution 11

2.2.3. Phonetic similarity 12

2.2.4. Over-analysis 12

2.2.5. Under-analysis 13

2.2.6. Phonemic economy 14

2.3. Using syllable structure in phonemic analysis 15

2.4. Features and the representation of sounds 17

2.4.1. Phonological features 17

2.4.2. Complex sounds and the No-Contour Principle 19

2.4.3. Length and diphthongs 20

2.4.4. Underspecifi cation 21

2.5. Glides 22

2.6. Consonants 23

2.7. Consonant–glide combinations 25

2.8. Palatals as Consonant–glide combinations 31

2.10. Vowels 35

2.10.1. High vowels 36

2.10.2. The mid vowel 37

2.10.3. The low vowel 38

2.10.4. The retrofl ex vowel 40

2.10.5. Diphthongs 40

2.10.6. Vowel length 40

2.11. How many sounds are there in Standard Chinese? 41

2.12. Feature charts for Standard Chinese sounds 45

3. COMBINATIONS AND VARIATION 48

3.1. Introduction 48

3.2. Phonetics and phonology: What is relevant? 49

3.3. The rule-based approach 50

3.4. The constraint-based approach 52

3.5. The data 54

3.5.1. Transcriptions 54

3.5.2. Rhyming groups 56

3.5.3. Missing forms 58

3.6. Rhyme-Harmony, Merge, and G-Spreading 60

3.7. Allophonic variations 64

3.7.1. G-Spreading 64

3.7.2. Surface variation in vowels 65

3.8. Transcription of surface Standard Chinese sounds 66

3.8.1. Required surface variations 67

3.8.2. Optional surface variations 68

3.9. Tone and vowel height 69

3.10. Labial onsets 69

3.11. Summary 70

4. THE SYLLABLE 71

4.1. Syllable boundaries 71

4.2. The onset: obligatory or optional? 72

4.3. The analysis of consonant–glide 79

4.4. Structure of stressed syllables 81

4.5. Structure of unstressed syllables 83

4.6. Language games 85

4.6.1. Na-ma 86

4.6.2. Mai-ka 87

4.6.3. Mo-pa 88

4.6.4. Summary 90

4.7. Final vs. non-fi nal positions 90

4.8. Casual speech and vowel-less syllables 91

4.9. Other views on the Chinese syllable 92

4.10. Homophone density, frequency, and syllable loss 94

4.11. Summary 96

5. WORDS AND COMPOUNDS 97

5.1. Introduction 97

5.2. Previous criteria for wordhood 99

5.2.1. The Lexical Integrity Hypothesis 99

5.2.2. Conjunction Reduction 99

5.2.3. Freedom of Parts 101

5.2.4. Semantic Composition 102

5.2.5. Syllable count 103

5.2.6. Insertion 104

5.2.7. Exocentric structure 108

5.2.8. Adverbial Modifi cation 109

5.2.9. XP Substitution 110

5.2.10. Productivity 111

5.2.11. Intuition 114

5.2.12. Summary 114

5.3. The present analysis 115

5.3.1. Tests to be rejected 115

5.3.2. Tests to be adopted with limitations 116

5.3.3. Tests to be adopted 117

5.3.4. Summary 118

5.4. Compound internal conjunction 119

5.5. [M de N] inside [M N] 120

5.6. Locatives 121

5.7. de-omission 122

5.8. Pseudo-compounds and pseudo-words 122

5.9. [A N] and Foot Shelter 125

5.10. [Pronoun N] 127

5.11. Summary 128

6. STRESS 129

6.1. Judgement on stress 129

6.2. Stress and syllabic weight 132

6.3. Stress and feet 133

6.4. Pitch accent, downstep, upstep, and levels of stress 134

6.5. Foot Binarity and the empty beat 135

6.6. Foot structure and the Dual Trochee 137

6.7. Word stress 140

6.8. The Information-Stress Principle 143

6.9. Phrasal stress 146

6.9.1. Phrasal stress in English 146

6.9.2. Phrasal stress in Chinese 148

6.10. Stress effects in Chinese 152

6.11. Other views of stress and foot in Chinese 155

6.12. Summary 157

7. THE WORD-LENGTH PROBLEM 158

7.1. Introduction 158

7.2. Abundance of disyllabic words in Chinese 159

7.3. The dual vocabulary 161

7.4. Ambiguity avoidance? 165

7.5. Other views on the use of disyllabic words 169

7.5.1. The speech-tempo approach 169

7.5.2. The grammatical approach 170

7.5.3. The rhythm approach 172

7.5.4. The morphologization approach 172

7.5.5. The stress-length approach 173

7.6. Stress, foot, and word-length choices 174

7.7. The minimal word and name usage 177

7.8. Non-metrical factors 179

7.9. Monosyllables in different word categories 182

7.10. Fixed-length words 185

7.11. [A N] compounds 186

7.12. Summary 189

8. THE WORD-ORDER PROBLEM 191

8.1. Introduction 191

8.2. [X Y N] compounds 192

8.3. [V-O N] compounds 195

8.3.1. The data 195

8.3.2. The analysis 200

8.4. [V-O N] compounds in English 203

8.5. Movement or not? 204

8.6. [V N] compounds 205

8.7. Compounds with internal VO phrases 208

8.8. Summary 211

9. THE [ɚ] SUFFIX 212

9.1. Introduction 212

9.2. Basic facts 212

9.3. Previous analyses 214

9.3.1. Y. Lin (1989) 214

9.3.2. Duanmu (1990) 216

9.3.3. J. Wang (1993) 216

9.4. The present analysis 218

9.5. Variations 221

9.6. Interaction between tone and the [ɚ] suffi x 223

9.7. The [ɚ] suffi x in other Mandarin dialects 223

9.8. Summary 224

10. TONE: BASIC PROPERTIES 225

10.1. Tone and tonal transcription 225

10.2. Phonetic correlates of tone 228

10.3. Tonal features: Pitch and Register 229

10.3.1. Pitch and Register 229

10.3.2. Levels of contrast 230

10.4. Contour tones and the tone-bearing unit 233

10.5. Is tone a prosodic feature? 235

10.6. Tones in Standard Chinese 236

10.6.1. Tones on full syllables 236

10.6.2. Variation of T3 238

10.6.3. Variation of T2 239

10.6.4. Tone on weak syllables 241

10.6.5. T3S and weak syllables 242

10.6.6. Tone and vowel height 243

10.6.7. Tone and length 244

10.6.8. Some special syllables 245

10.6.9. Reduplicated patterns 247

10.7. Tone and stress: the Tone-Stress Principle 248

10.8. Tone and intonation 250

10.9. Tone in songs 252

10.10. Tonal frequencies in Standard Chinese 253

10.11. Summary 253

11. TONE 3 SANDHI (T3S) 254

11.1. Introduction 254

11.2. The data 255

11.3. The tree-only analysis 257

11.4. The stress-insensitive foot analysis 260

11.5. The present analysis 266

11.6. Summary 273

12. RHYTHM IN POETRY 275

12.1. What is rhythm in poetry? 275

12.2. Is rhythm determined by the syntactic tree? 277

12.3. Stress pattern, template, and their mapping 279

12.4. Is it easier to create poems in Chinese? 284

12.5. Template typology 286

12.6. Approaches to template typology 292

12.7. The prosodic hierarchy 295

12.8. Summary 297

13. CONNECTED SPEECH AND OTHER DIALECTS 298

13.1. Introduction 298

13.2. Consonant reduction 298

13.3. De-stressing and rhyme reduction 299

13.4. Vowel devoicing and voiceless syllables 300

13.5. Syllable merger 302

13.6. Phonological processes in other dialects 304

13.6.1. Tone sandhi in Wu dialects 304

13.6.2. Tone sandhi in Min dialects 305

13.6.3. Tone sandhi in Tianjin 306

13.6.4. Rhyme changes 306

13.6.5. Language games 307

13.7. Taiwanese accented Standard Chinese 307

13.7.1. Lexicon 307

13.7.2. Stress 308

13.7.3. Tone 308

13.7.4. Segmental differences 310

13.7.5. Consonant reduction and syllable merger 311

13.8. Summary 312

14. THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS 313

Appendix: Full Syllables in Standard Chinese 319

References 331

Index 351