Open AccessOn the Left-/Right-Branching Asymmetry in Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi
Author(s) -
Fulang Chen
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
proceedings of the annual meetings on phonology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2377-3324
DOI - 10.3765/amp.v9i0.4881
Subject(s) - branching (polymer chemistry) , mandarin chinese , asymmetry , expression (computer science) , linguistics , tone (literature) , phrase , left and right , mathematics , computer science , natural language processing , physics , particle physics , philosophy , chemistry , organic chemistry , structural engineering , engineering , programming language
In Mandarin, a left-/right-branching asymmetry is observed when the Tone 3 Sandhi (T3S) process interacts with the syntactic structure of an expression: while expressions that have a left-branching syntactic structure only have a non-alternating sandhi pattern in which all but the rightmost T3 is changed to the sandhi tone, for expressions that have a right-branching syntactic structure various sandhi patterns are possible. This paper proposes that T3S applies cyclically bottom-up on a prosodic structure matched from the syntactic structure of an expression, along the lines of the Match Theory of syntactic-prosodic constituency correspondence (Selkirk 2011). The interaction of Match Phrase constraints and Strong Strong Start, which is a more restricted version of Selkirk’s (2011) Strong Start constraint, predicts that different prosodic structures are possible outputs for a right-branching expression, while for a left-branching expression the only possible output is a left-branching prosodic structure. The various possible sandhi patterns for a right-branching expression and the non-alternating sandhi pattern for a left-branching expression are derived when T3S applies cyclically bottom-up on the proposed prosodic structures.