Apr 15
Breaking the 'cycle': Mandarin tone sandhi via c-command
Please join the Cognitive Science & Linguistics Department for a Colloquium by Sam Kennedy, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Minnesota. His research interests include syntax, with a particular focus on word order, linearization, and Spell-Out, in Taiwanese, Mandarin, Dakota, Ewe, and Hmong.
Mandarin is a tonal language in which the tone of a syllable can change based on the syllable that follows, and with three or more syllables of a certain category, interesting patterns of tonal change emerge. The standard analysis is that a single phonological rule applies 'cyclically' over and over again, generating these various patterns. In this talk, I argue that while it can generate the patterns, this cyclicity has a theoretical cost, and I offer an alternative (with a little help from syntax).
from Linguistics