Phonotactic constraints in Chinese dialects

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2015

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Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2002

San Duanmu's Phonology of Standard Chinese is the first book-length English-language treatise on the synchronic sound system of Mandarin Chinese in twenty years. The author incorporates linguistic theories developed since the 1970s, such as autosegmental phonology, feature geometry, and optimality theory, to give an updated and much more accurate account of the segmental and suprasegmental units of Standard Chinese, while at the same time constructing an original model of stress, tone, and syllable structure. He provides in the process unique insights to age-old controversies such as missing combinations in the Mandarin syllabary, the nature of the Mandarin third tone and Tone 3 Sandhi, and why Chinese morphology is sensitive to the number of syllables in an expression. Duanmu's work is a marriage of Western phonetic/phonological science and Chinese laboratory and survey data-one that constitutes a substantial advance in our understanding of the structure of Modem Standard Chinese.

2003

Lingua Sinica

The "non-uniqueness" theory assumes that there is no best solution in phonemic analysis; rather, competing solutions can co-exist, each having its own advantages (Chao, Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology 4: 363-398, 1934). The theory is based on the assumption that there is no common set of criteria to evaluate alternative solutions. I argue instead that such a set of criteria can be established and it is possible to find the best solution. The criteria include riming properties, rime structure, constraints on syllable gaps, phonemic economy, phonetics, syllable sizes, and feature theory. I illustrate the proposal with Chengdu. Four analyses are compared, the "CGV" segmentation, the "CV" segmentation, the "finest" segmentation, and the "CVX" segmentation, and CVX is shown to be the best.

Journal of Chinese Linguistics 43.2, 2015, 719-732 (fortchoming)

Kobe Papers in Linguistics 5 [神戸言語学論叢], 2007

Although investigation of the phonology of the Chinese dialects is by no means exhaustive, our knowledge of that level of the language is by far the more complete. Here, therefore, I attempt to discuss some lexical phenomena. As a result of historical background, geography conditions, living environment, manners and customs and other factors, Cantonese and Mandarin have many differences in vocabulary. Lexical contrast between dialects forms a broad field. There are many interesting phenomena that deserve us to discuss. This paper investigates one phenomenon, which is called ‘using each morpheme of the paratactic compound’. One of the major characteristics of Chinese vocabulary is that paratactic compounds take up a comparatively larger portion, since this word-formation model is productive. Comparing Mandarin with Cantonese, we find that there are some paratactic compounds that existed in written Chinese, which Cantonese always uses one morpheme of the paratactic compound to represent the whole meaning of the compound, while Mandarin uses another morpheme. This paper first describes data of the phenomenon ‘using each morpheme’; second, analyzes the characteristics of this phenomenon; third, concludes possible reasons of ‘using each morpheme’. A short conclusion is appended to the paper.

Language Learning and Development, 2023

Phonological models of early word learning often assume that child forms can be understood as structural mappings from their adult targets. In contrast, the whole-word phonology model suggests that on beginning word production children represent adult targets as holistic units, reflecting not the exact sound sequence but only the most perceptually salient elements or those that align with their own vocal patterns. Here we ask whether the predictions of the whole-word model are supported by data from children learning Japanese or Mandarin, both languages with phonotactic structures differing from any so far investigated from this perspective. The Japanese child word forms are found to include some characteristics suggestive of whole-word representation, but in Mandarin we find little or no such evidence. Instead, some children are found to make idiosyncratic use of whole syllables, substituting them for target syllables that they match in neither onset nor rime. This result, which neither model anticipates, forces reconsideration of a key tenet of the whole-word model – that early word production is based on word-size holistic representations; instead, at least in some languages, the syllable may serve as the basic representational unit for child learners.

Phonotactics refers to the principles according to which lan- guages allow sound combinations and segment sequencing to form larger units such as syllables and words. In the study of phono- tactics, we are faced with a series of apparent contradictions and empirical problems that require critical comparisons of alternative explanatory models and, most often, an investigation of the ‘inter- faces’ between phonotactics and other levels of linguistic organiza- tion, particularly phonetics and morphology. One problematic aspect is due to the fact that phonotactics is part of the phonological gram- mar of a language, and at the same time it is regulated by a number of non-categorical, probabilistic constraints and preferences. It is thus not surprising that the awareness among linguists regarding the role of probability, so crucial in accounting for changes and vari- ations across languages and historical stages (Bod et al. 2003), has developed early in connection with observations on the variability in the ‘phonotactic grammar’ of speakers (e.g. Scholes 1966) and on the changing degrees of ‘acceptability’ of word-sized strings (later called ‘wordlikeness’ – a term that explicitly presupposes a probabilistic view of the phonology). A second challenging issue related to phono- tactics has to do with the universal versus language-specific nature of phonotactic rules and preferences. Asking what is common to all linguistic systems and what, by contrast, is implemented in individ- ual phonologies under specific conditions has promoted the adoption of a variety of empirical methodologies ranging from the survey of big samples of languages to the psycholinguistic study of how pho- notactic structures are processed and acquired, and from probability computations to the investigation of how consonantal and vocalic sequences are produced and perceived.