Rethinking the syntactic constraints on Fuzhou tone sandhi: a Distributed Morphology-based approach

Abstract

The tone sandhi patterns of Fuzhou are sensitive to grammatical relations that hold between elements of an intonational phrase, more so than in any other dialect of Chinese. Hung (1987) noted that Fuzhou tone sandhi observed a rigid pattern of semantico-syntactic constraints, generalizing that modifiers preceding heads and arguments following heads will together form a tone sandhi domain, but not modifiers that follow heads or arguments that precede heads. A decade later, Chan (1998) argues for the merits of a lexical-government based account of the phenomenon, aiming toward a explanation more strictly based on syntactic structure. Contra Chan, I approach the problem of Fuzhou tone sandhi from the perspective of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz (1993)), and argue that presence of Fuzhou tone sandhi is a result of the two elements in question forming a single morphosyntactic word, either syntactically (through compounding) or post-syntactically (through morphological merger). New evidence on consonant sandhi--whose licensing conditions are similar to but more constrained than those of tone sandhi--is considered alongside the tone sandhi facts, and supports the hypothesis that there are indeed multiple word-formation processes at work. This new theory correctly predicts the presence of sandhi between manner adverbs and verbs, verbs and bare nouns, adjectives and nouns, as well as between any two elements of a canonical compound. It also correctly predicts the absence of sandhi between subjects and verbs, sentential adverbs and verbs, as well as between verbs and either quantified or non-logical objects. References Chan, Lee-Lee. 1998. Fuzhou Tone Sandhi. Dissertation, University of California, San Diego. Halle, M., and A. Marantz. 1993. 'Distributed Morphology and the pieces of inflection,' in K. Hale and S. J. Keyser, (eds.) The View from Building 20: Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 111-176. Hung, Tony T.N. 1992. Syntactico-semantic conditions on Fuzhou Tone Sandhi. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, v. 20 (1)