Chinese compounds : the role of morphosyntactic structure in stress assignment in Shanghai chinese and tone sandhi in mandarin chinese

• Autor(a) principal: Liu, Haiyang
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/56966
• topic: Domínio/Área Científica::Humanidades::Línguas e Literaturas

At the interface of morphosyntax and phonology, some phonological behaviors in Chinese languages are sensitive to word domain (stress assignment/stress resolution and tone sandhi). In this thesis, we focus on how morphosyntactic structures can contribute to some phonological behaviors that remain to be puzzles in the Chinese languages. Additionally, a highly-functional morphosyntax-based framework is shown to be realistic to construct a simplified and consistent model in domain construction of T3 tone sandhi in Chinese Mandarin, which has been considered challenging in the literature. Following “Little x heads” theory (Marantz 1995; Marantz 2001) and syntactic incorporated compounding structures (Harley 2009), we use a syntactic multiple-root incorporated structure for Chinese compounding structures to account for the stress assignment and stress resolution (stress clash avoidance) in Shanghai Chinese with revised Phase Impenetrability for Phonology (rPIP) (Embick 2013). Meanwhile, a tentative Concatenation rule (Pak 2008; Chen 2018) after Linearization of Morphological words is proposed to account for the domain construction in T3 tone sandhi in Mandarin Chinese, which refers to specific morphosyntactic information (morphosyntactic locality characteristics and c-command relations). Different from the literature, we add the syntactic multiple-root incorporated structure of Chinese compounding structures into the algorithm of Concatenation rule. This is proved to be essential to successfully construct a unified framework of T3 tone sandhi in Mandarin Chinese both above and below the classical word domain, showing a noteworthy ability to deal with the exceptional situations in Chen (2009), e.g., syntactic words, phonological words and complex predicates. This project supports that morphosyntax-based analysis under syntactic word formation, e.g., Concatenation rules in Distributed Morphology, is a powerful weapon to reveal the processing logic of some controversial phonological rules vaguely floating between the classical lexical and postlexical rules in the literature, e.g., sandhi behaviours. Under the current framework, differently from multimorphemic structures, the monomorphemic structures seem to be opaque in the application process of specific non-cyclic phonological rules. Such opaque monomorphemic structures can be postulated to be a product or outcome of certain phonological rules’ processing economy and efficiency, instead of a true grammatical identity.