THE PROSODIC DOMAIN OF TONE SANDHI IN CHINESE (PHRASAL PHONOLOGY, TONAL TYPOLOGY, MANDARIN, SYNTAX-PHONOLOGY INTERFACE)

In this dissertation, I discuss phonological analyses of tone sandhi rules, as well as the domains in which tone sandhi rules apply. After a survey of Sino-Tibetan languages, I suggest that the melody-bearing unit in Chinese is shifting from the syllable to the word. This change is the motivation for many rules that have no immediate explanation on the surface. As it turns out, Tone sandhi rules in this language family are usually neutralization processes: in polysyllabic words, the function load of tonal distinction is reduced, hence the tone loss. This approach suggests an explanation for the underlying distinction between African and Asian tone languages, and shows that the difference is minimized on the surface with the application of tone sandhi rules.;Chinese dialects also provide a rich resource for the study of tone sandhi domains, which exemplify the complex interface between syntax and phonology. There is strong evidence supporting a two-level phonological model. One type of tone sandhi domain, such as in Xiamen, is best defined in terms of syntactic relations, and the tone sandhi processes are assigned to the P1 level of phonology. Another type, such as in Standard Mandarin, Changzhi, and Fuzhou, is sensitive to prosodic and performance factors, and the processes belong to the P2 level of phonology. A simple algorithm, namely, the Foot Formation Rule, is developed to convert the syntactic structures to the prosodic structures of these dialects. Mandarin tone sandhi also reveals the hierarchical nature of the prosodic structure, for the rule cycles on prosodic constituents.