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ROA:159
Title:Feet, tonal reduction and speech rate at the word and phrase level in Chinese
Authors:Moira Yip
Comment:Paper submitted to Proceedings of the OTS Workshop on Prosodic and Phrasal Phonology, Utrecht 1996
Length:27
Abstract:Feet, tonal reduction and speech rate at the word and
phrase level in Chinese

Moira Yip

Abstract


Chinese languages group syllables into prosodic units, which I will call feet,
and these feet form the domain of tone deletion and tone sandhi processes,
as well as segmental lenition effects. This paper offers an OT analysis of
the cross-linguistic variation in tone retention/tone deletion in non-head
syllables and feet, and the variation in foot size. It is shown that the tonal
facts require HeadMax constraints that require retention of head tones.
Together with the HeadDep and HeadIdent constraints of Alderete 1995,
this completes the family of positional faithfulness constraints. In the tonal
analog of Russian vowel reduction, it is shown that in Wu dialects faithfulness
may be complete in head syllables, partial in head feet, and violated elsewhere.

It is further shown that n-ary feet must be admitted, and this is achieved by
a low ranking of Ft-Bin-Max. The final section looks closely at n-ary feet in
Nantong, and compares two alternative analyses of apparent changes in prosodic
structure conditioned by speech rate.



Note: This paper has been submitted to the Proceedings of the OTS Workshop
on Prosodic and Phrasal Phonology.
Type:Paper/tech report
Area/Keywords:
Article:Version 1