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International Journal of Chinese Linguistics
Vol. 3:1 (2016) ► pp.1–44

Pattern substitution in Wuxi tone sandhi and its implication for phonological learning

| University of Kansas

Tone sandhi in Wuxi Chinese involves “pattern substitution,” whereby the base tone on the first syllable is first substituted by another tone, then spread to the sandhi domain. We conducted a wug test to investigate native Wuxi speakers’ tacit knowledge of tone sandhi and found that the substituion aspect of the sandhi is not fully productive, but the extension aspect is, and sandhi productivity is influenced by the phonetic similarity between base and sandhi tones. These results are discussed in the context of how phonological opacity, phonetic naturalness, and lexical frequency influence phonological learning, and a grammatical learning model that can predict Wuxi speakers’ experimental behavior is proposed.

Keywords: Maximum Entropy grammar, Tone Sandhi, opacity, Wuxi, productivity
Published online: 16 June 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ijchl.3.1.01yan
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