| Abstract |
In this paper three types of tonal changes in Mandarin reduplicants are reanalyzed in the Optimality Theoretical framework (Prince & Smolensky 1993, McCarthy & Prince 1993,1994,1995,1999). The underlying tones of the kinship-noun reduplicant jie jie ‘sister’ and the general reduplicant haw haw ‘good’ are the third tones. The following tones of the reduplicants change to the neutral tone through the Neutral Tone Sandhi Rule. The third tone of the preceding syllable haw changes by undergoing the Third Tone Sandhi Rule (Shih 1997) but the preceding tone of jie jie does not, neither the preceding tone of r-suffixation reduplicant haw hawr ‘in a good way’ does. Especially, the following tone of the r-suffixation reduplicant changes to the high tone. The proposals of morphological marking (Cheng 1973) and tone-copying principle (Yip 1980) and the Lexical Phonology frameworks do not give the complete explanations for the three types of tonal changes. Optimality Theory suggests the Reduplication model where there are three correspondence relationships, Input-RED (IR), Input-Base (IB), Base-RED (BR). Through the ranking of the constraints concerning the IR, IB, BR correspondence, the problems of three types of tonal changes are analyzed nicely. |
