Directionality in Chengdu tone sandhi
Hui-shan Lin · Concentric Studies in Linguistics · 2006
This paper examines tone sandhi in Chengdu, which is a southwestern Mandarin dialect spoken in Sichuan Province, China. The investigation of the tone sandhi phenomena reveals some rather interesting properties of Chengdu. First, in tri-tonal strings, both left-to-right and right-to-left tone sandhi operation directionalities are observed; nonetheless, the operation directionalities appear to be ungoverned. Second, in quadri-tonal strings, morphosyntactic structures, which are completely functionless in predicting tone sandhi in tri-tonal strings, start to be respected. In this paper, Ⅰ argue that the tone sandhi operation directionality in tri-tonal sandhi is by no means ungoverned. Normally tone sandhi operates from right to left for identity reasons, unless marked forms would be generated. In that case, tone sandhi operates reversely from left to right. Thus, the seemingly unpredictable tonal operation directionality in tri-tonal strings is naturally captured by the interaction of the identity and the markedness constraints. As for why morphosyntactic structure starts to take a role in quadri-tonal sandhi, Ⅰ argue that Chengdu has an upper limit on the size of the tone sandhi domain, which is three syllables. When the strings exceed the upper limit of the domain size, they are divided into independent domains to avoid generating oversized ones. The division of the strings into different domains is not ad hoc, but is sensitive to morphosyntactic structures.