IULC Publications

Syntactic and Semantic Aspects of Chinese Tone Sandhi

By Tony T. N. Hung

Dr. Hung's work is one of the first cross-dialectal investigations of tone sandhi phenomena in Chinese from the point of view of the syntactic and semantic conditions on domains of application at the phrase level, or the level of 'tone groups.' The study reveals that in Mandarin, Fuzhou, and Tianjin, the constituents of a tone group must stand in a head-modifier or head-complement relation to each other. In Fuzhou, for instance, only modifiers preceding the head or a single argument following the head can form a tone group with it. In contrast, in Shanghai, non-lexical items and certain lexical items with low semantic content are tonally neutralized and incorporated in a syntactic or semantic constituent. On a less extensive scale, this same process is paralleled by neutral tone phenomena in Beijing Mandarin. Dr. Hung proposes a number of syntactic, semantic, and phonological motivations for these cross-dialectal similarities and differences.

155 pages
$11.00

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