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Southern Min Tone Sandhi as Polar Boundary Tones
Andrew Nevins (UCL/UFRJ) and Nicholas Rolle (Princeton)
Southern Min Chinese (SMC) tone sandhi has been taken as emblematic of ‘paradigmatic substitution’, where one tone replaces another wholesale in a sandhi context, rather than being derived by phonological operations. We argue that far from being ‘arbitrary and idiosyncratic’ or ‘incomputable’ (Schuh 1978; Moreton 1999), SMC tone sandhi actually constitutes a well-behaved system involving established notions of underspecification, tonal features, and markedness. This renders SMC far less mysterious than it initially seems, relevant to questions of analytic naturalness and learnability in phonology (Moreton 2008; Becker, Ketrez, & Nevins 2011). Specifically, we subvert the predominant analysis of SMC that the isolation form of a tone is underlying, and instead take the ‘sandhi’ form as underlying. We attribute tone alternations which take place at the end of a phonological phrase to the presence of a polar register boundary tone R%, which takes the opposite register of the final word. In this way, we formalize the insight that SMC tone alternations function as demarcative tone sandhi (Chen 2000).
