The Tone Change In Mandarin Reduplication: An OT Account

This thesis focuses on one kind of Mandarin reduplication AA type and presents an analysis of the tone change in Mandarin reduplication within the framework of optimality theory(OT)According to correspondence theory,tone will always get copied when a form is reduplicated in a tone language.But the facts in Mandarin turn out to be more complicated.Sometimes a form may be reduplicated without its tone.Take kinship nominal reduplication for example:/t(?)iε/(21)/t(?)iε/(N)"elder sister" has neutral tone on the second syllable and the underlying third tone on the first syllable does not change to the second tone(35)which indicates that the tone is not copied along with the segments.This thesis accounts for this by positing the constraint hierarchy~*RED(T)＞＞MAX-T-BR.While in other reduplicated forms such as adjective and verbal reduplication,Tones are copied as well as segments.This thesis captures this by exploiting the reverse constraints ranking MAX-T-BR＞＞~*RED(T).This kind of analysis coincides with the present Chinese research outcome which claims that there are two major reduplicative constructions in Mandarin:one occurs in morphological domain,the other occurs in syntactic domain.This thesis claims that morphological reduplication is partial reduplication,i.e.,tone is not copied,where the constraints ranking is ~*RED(T)＞＞MAX-T-BR.The syntactic reduplication is total reduplication,i.e tone is copied,where the constraints ranking is MAX-T-BR＞＞~*RED(T)This thesis contains six chapters.Chapter one presents an introduction of the research contents and the rationale and orientation of the present study.Chapter two is a survey of previous studies on Mandarin reduplication.Chapter three offers a review of reduplication in OT drawing primarily from McCarthy and Prince(1994). Chapter 4 introduces the characteristics of reduplication in Mandarin.Chapter 5 presents an analysis of tone change in Mandarin reduplication and shows how optimality approach can account for all cases of tone change in AA type reduplication through proper ranking of constraints within the overall constraints hierarchy.Finally chapter 6 gives some conclusions remarks.