A Synchronic Phonology of Mandarin Chinese

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MONOGRAPHS ON LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS No. 4

Monographs on Linguistic Analysis is a series published by Mouton for the Project on Linguistic Analysis (POLA), which is under the direction of Professor William S-Y. Wang of the Department of Linguistics, University of California at Berkeley. The Project began in 1961 at the Ohio State University, and moved to Berkeley in 1966. Since its inception, research on POLA has been largely supported by grants from the National Science Foundation. The series is concerned with investigations on the organization of language, especially in its phonological properties. It includes reports on work primarily by members of POLA, though work by others will be occasionally included in the MOLA series. The first four monographs in the following list have already been published. The remaining two will be available very shortly. MOLA 1. C. J. Fillmore Indirect object construction in English and the ordering of transformations MOLA 2. J. D. McCawley The Phonological component of a grammar of Japanese MOLA 3. C. D. Johnson Formal aspects of Phonological description MOLA 4. C. C. Cheng A synchronic phonology of Mandarin Chinese MOLA 5. A. I. Moskowitz The acquisition of phonology MOLA 6. M. Chen Nasals and nasalization in Chinese explorations in phonological universals

A SYNCHRONIC PHONOLOGY OF MANDARIN CHINESE

by CHIN-CHUAN CHENG University of Illinois

1973 MOUTON THE HAGUE · PARIS

© Copyright 1973 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N. V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 72-88180

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., The Hague

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work is based on my University of Illinois Ph.D. dissertation. I wish to thank Professor William S-Y. Wang for his helpful discussions of various aspects of this book. I am also grateful to Miss lovanna Condax, Miss Johanna Kovitz, and Professor Pang-hsin Ting who read the entire manuscript and made many valuable suggestions. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation Grant GS2386 and Air Force Contract F30602-71-C-0116 to the University of California, Berkeley, and in part by the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

5

1. Introduction

9

2. Finals 2.1. High vowels 2.2. Mid and low vowels

12 12 14

3. Retroflex suffixation

24

4. Final elision

34

5. Initials

35

6. Tones 6.1. Four underlying tones 6.2. Tonal changes 6.3. The tone sandhi rule

41 41 42 45

7. The 7.1. 7.2. 7.3.

54 54 57

neutral tone Phonetic properties of the neutral tone Stress and the neutral tone Tonal specifications of neutral-tone items in the lexicon 7.4. The tone sandhi rule and the neutral tone rule . . . 7.5. The neutral tone and segment taxing

63 68 73

8. Summary

84

References

85

Appendix

88

INTRODUCTION

In the past, most works on Mandarin phonology have centered on complementary distribution of a few consonants and classification of sounds. As a consequence, other aspects of Mandarin phonology were only superficially touched upon. In the literature, we hardly find, for example, explanations of the alternative pronunciations [mien xua ~ mien xuo] 'cotton'. As I see it, the most interesting topics in Mandarin phonology are backness assimilation in finals, application of tone sandhi, the interrelation between tone sandhi and the neutral tone rules, and backness assimilation in unstressed syllables. These are the main points to be discussed in this work. For reasons of ease of reading, I have chosen to avoid rule formalism and formal rules. Instead, the substance of the general rules that underlie most of the phonetic phenomena will be given in words. In this section, a few basic notions are given. Generally speaking, in Chinese every syllable has its own lexical meaning. Consider the following Mandarin examples: (1) (a) (b) (c)

[t'äi] [läi] [c'äi]

'stand' 'to come' 'to care'

These syllables have the same vocalic segments, and they rhyme.1 1

These words occur in the following children's rhyme popular in Northern China: [flau lau su särj tag t'äi] [t'öu iou ' ciä pu läi] [teiau ma ma ma ma pu c'äi] [tei II kü IQ kuän ciä läi]

10

INTRODUCTION

Besides the vocalic part, each item has a consonant at the beginning and a distinct pitch superimposed over the whole syllable. Traditionally, a Chinese syllable is divided into three parts: the beginning consonant is called the INITIAL; the remainder of the segmental sequence, the FINAL ; and the pitch, the TONE. Two syllables may rhyme even if they do not have exactly the same final, for example: (2) (a) (b)

[lou] [liou]

'building' 'to flow'

These two syllables differ in that (2b) has an additional [i]. Thus two items rhyme if they have the same main vowel and the same segment following the main vowel. In a final, the segment preceding the main vowel or NUCLEUS is called the MEDIAL, and the segment following the nucleus is called the ENDING. The ending can be further divided into vocalic ending and consonantal ending. In the Fuzhou dialect, the vocalic and consonantal endings may occur in a final, for example, [eirj]. In Mandarin, however, except in retroflex-suffixed morphemes, which will be discussed in Section 3, the vocalic and consonantal endings do not occur together in a syllable. Since words rhyme even if they do not have the same medial, we may call that part of the final excluding the medial the RIME. Generally speaking, a syllable may have no initial, medial, or ending, but it always has a nucleus and a tone. The tone is part of the syllable in the lexicon. For example, in Mandarin the combination [ma] with high level (~~), high rising ('), low falling and rising ("), and high falling 0) tones forms four distinct lexical items: (3) (a) (b) (c) (d)

[mä] [mä] [mä] [mä]

'mother' 'hemp' 'horse' 'to scold'

Thus the structure of the Chinese syllable can be illustrated as follows: The examples in the main text are collected and given in Chinese characters in the Appendix.

INTRODUCTION

(4)

11

tone

final rime ending initial

medial

vocalic nucleus ending

consonantal ending

This traditional analysis of the Chinese syllable can be traced back to as early as the sixth century. The items in the rhyme book Qie yim, which was published in 601 A.D., are first divided into four groups according to tones. Each group is then divided into some fifty odd rimes. Each item in a rime is then spelled by two characters, the initial of the upper character representing the initial of the item, and the final and tone of the lower character representing the final and tone of the item. In the following sections I shall discuss Mandarin phonology in terms of finals, initials and tones in that order.

2

FINALS

Phonetically, the following vowels occur in Mandarin: (5)

\ iü u e a YO a

Since, as we shall see, the mid and low vowels have much in common, in the following discussions we divide the vocalic sounds into a class of high vowels and a group of nonhigh vowels.

2.1 HIGH VOWELS

Like many other languages in the world, Mandarin has the high vowels [i] and [u], for example: (6) (a) (b)

[i] [ü]

'clothes' 'crow'

There is nothing to suggest that their phonological representations should be anything other than the phonetic forms. Hence we posit their underlying forms as i and u. Mandarin has a high front rounded vowel, for example: (7)

[ü]

'far-fetched'

This sound has been posited as tu or ü. Lawton M. Hartman (1944) regards it as the sequence /jwi/ (/jw/ when it is medial). Charles F. Hockett first (1947) considers it as iu but later (1950) abandons

FINALS

13

the sequence in favor of a unit w based on an argument I will later show to be untenable. Samuel E. Martin (1957) treats it as iu for reasons of distribution: in his terms, there is a [fu] but no *[fi] or *[fu], and k is palatalized before i and iu but not before u. The phenomena simply show that / and k do not occur before high front vowels. Since both [i] and [ü] are high front vowels there is no need to posit iu for [ü] in order to characterize this distribution. Since this sequence iu will give the syllable [üe] as iue with two medials, this treatment unnecessarily adds complexity to the structure of the Chinese syllable. Moreover, the choice of the sequence I'M rather than ü was largely a result of the linguistic practice at one time to save the number of symbols needed to describe the sounds in a language, and it has no real linguistic justification. Since there is no strong synchronic evidence to show that [ü] derives from an underlying I'M, following most Chinese linguists, we posit it as a. Finally in the high vowel class, there are two other vocalic sounds slightly different from each other. They are the so-called 'dental apical vowel' [i] and 'retroflex apical vowel' [i]. The dental apical vowel occurs after the dental sibilants [c, c', s], and the retroflex apical vowel appears after the retroflex sibilants [9, c', s, r]. The dental apical vowel is pronounced like a prolonged [z], while the retroflex apical vowel is pronounced like a prolonged [z]. These two sounds are usually considered two variants, homorganic with the preceding consonant, of a high vowel. Hartman (1944) simply considers its underlying identity to be a 'high vowel'. In X-ray studies, Diän-fü Zhöu and Zong-jl Wu (1963), comparing these apical vowels with the high front unrounded vowel, find that in the production of the apical vowels the highest point of the tongue is slightly more front and the back of the tongue is slightly higher. Thus these apical vowels have two simultaneous points of articulation, one at the tongue tip and the other at the body of the tongue. Phonetically, the apical articulation may be more distinct, but the articulation of the body of the tongue seems to be more important in terms of phonological patterning. The apical vowels are like [u], except for a subsequent change, but unlike [i] and [ü]

14

FINALS

in retroflex suffixation, by which [i ar] and [ ar] become [iar] and [uar], but the apical vowels plus [ar] and [u] plus [ar] become [ar] and [ur]. Furthermore, the apical vowels are unrounded. Therefore I posit an unrounded high central i, its two variants being determined by the preceding consonants. I shall simply write [i] for its phonetic identity in both conditions. Thus we posit four underlying high vowels i, , i, and u for Mandarin.

2.2 MID AND LOW VOWELS

Now let us examine the mid and low vowels in Mandarin. Of the mid and low vowels, [a] and [Y] may occur as single vowel finals, for example: (8) (a) (b)

[td] [tv]

'to reach' 'virture'

I shall begin the discussion by positing a and r (the latter, a mid back unrounded vowel) as the two underlying nonhigh vocalic segments. First consider the following examples: (9) (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g)

[an] [ίέη] [u n] [ n] [dij] [idn] [udn]

'peace* 'smoke' 'bent' 'injustice' 'rise' 'sun' 'king'

Since η is front and η back, it is likely that the backness of an underlying low vowel is determined by its following sonorant. If we posit one low back vowel in underlying representation, we then need the following rule to derive the phonetic form [a]:

(10)

α -> a /

η

This rule says that if the low vowel precedes n, then it is front.

FINALS

15

Next we consider the following phonetic fusion:1 (11)

[9v] [i] -» [