Chinese tone sandhi:: And Steve Chu’s HeNan trick
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Tone sandhi is a common occurrence in different varieties, the most famous being Mandarin Chinese, in which a third tone (high-low-high, or falling-rising) followed by another third tone becomes a low-high or rising tone. Traditional accounts of tonal assimilation are argued against, in that they fail to account for the specific outcome of the changed tone, and especially fail when applied to other Chinese dialects with much more complex tone sandhi phenomena. Historical and cross-dialectal data are presented, showing that these tonal changes seem to preserve archaic tone values and features. The regular, unchanged tonal values represent the preferred default underlying representations, while the sandhi (changed tone) values occur only in specific contexts, namely, in certain tone combinations. These facts, and the wholly arbitrary values of the sandhi tones, indicate that they are historical relics and operate in the grammars of modern dialects as morphophonemic material. Their appearance in restricted contexts can be accounted for by directional alignment constraints that override other faithfulness constraints, along with constraints that require faithful outputs for prosodic heads. A set of such constraints is proposed to account for Mandarin sandhi. The same kinds of constraints also work in a non-cyclical form of optimality theory which uses output-output constraints for more complex forms of sandhi, as shown for Tianjin dialect.
Original Title: ROA LIST 554-548
Now this one is close to useful.
I know what I am about to say here is not linguistically related to sandi, but nonetheless digression is manditory in blogging.
Going back to my graduate study days in UIUC, my old friend from daycare, Stephen Chu, claimed — over beers — that he could speak HeNan dialect, which is a northen Chinese dialect borders on mutually intelligible with Mandarin. But still it would be incredible, knowing that he had never been there. So we tested him with several sentences. His translation was very HeNan, as much as I can tell, thought they took him several seconds of pauses for each sentence.
When the truth was finally revealed, it turns out he learned from somewhere a set of phonological rules (he was doing a CS PhD on speech recognition, if I remember correctly): 1st tone -> 2nd, 2nd->4th, 4th->1st, and 3rd stays. It works reasonably well (provided I remember the rules correctly).
It´s admitedly a simple rule-based transformation, and has nothing to do with OT. But I think over a couple of beers one can come up with an OT for this… or maybe not.
| 549-1002 | Chinese tone sandhi and prosody Kent Lee • Abstract • Download as: <PDF> <PS | gzip> |
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