Processing Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi at the Morphosyntactic Interface: Reduplication and Lexical Compounds

Abstract

Mandarin tone 3 sandhi is a phonological alternation in which the initial tone 3 (i.e., low tone) syllable changes to a tone 2 (i.e., rising tone) when followed by another tone 3. The present study used a cross-modal syllable-morpheme matching experiment to examine how native speakers process the sandhi sequences derived from verb reduplication and compounding, respectively. Embedded in a visually-presented sentential context, a disyllabic sequence containing a sandhi target was displayed simultaneously with a monosyllabic audio, either a tone 1 (i.e., high-level tone), tone 2 (i.e., rising tone) or tone 3 (i.e., low tone), and participants judged whether the audio syllable matched the visual morpheme. Results showed that the tone 3 sandhi was processed differently in the two constructions. The underlying tone and the surface tone were co-activated and competed with each other in sandhi compounds whereas predominant activation of the underlying tone, over the surface tone, was observed in reduplication. The processing of tone 3 sandhi offers support for distinctive morphological structures: a lexical compound is represented both as a whole-word unit and as a combination of two individual morphemes whereas a verb reduplication is represented and accessed as a monomorphemic unit in the mental lexicon.

A Review on Semantic and Syntactic Constraints of VV Reduplication in Mandarin Chinese: Retrospections and Development

“…For studies on grammatical category, two new perspectives are available, namely, morpho-syntactical and constructional. Morpho-syntactically, some scholars hold that the reduplicant is an affix (Sui, 2018;Gao et al, 2021). Gao et al (2021) conducted empirical studies on Mandarin tone sandhi of VV reduplication and lexical compounds and found out that for VV reduplication, only the monomorphemic verb base was accessed in the mental lexicon and "the second constituent likely serves as an affix", therefore, unlike lexical compounds, VV reduplication "is not stored as a lexical entry" (Gao et al, 2021: p. 16).…”

“…Morpho-syntactically, some scholars hold that the reduplicant is an affix (Sui, 2018;Gao et al, 2021). Gao et al (2021) conducted empirical studies on Mandarin tone sandhi of VV reduplication and lexical compounds and found out that for VV reduplication, only the monomorphemic verb base was accessed in the mental lexicon and "the second constituent likely serves as an affix", therefore, unlike lexical compounds, VV reduplication "is not stored as a lexical entry" (Gao et al, 2021: p. 16). Chen & Wu (2023) seem to agree that the reduplicant is an affix and argues that VV reduplication is a post-syntax PF (phonetic form) operation caused by lowering of de-limitative aspect head which induced the phonetic copying of the verb.…”

“…Consequently, VV reduplication, derived from V yi V with yi dropped, is also lexicalized. Deng & Qi (2023) accentuate the holistic nature of VV reduplication which may resist certain syntactic movements, however, the idea that VV reduplication is lexicalized is not supported by the empirical studies by Gao et al (2021). Furthermore, according to Deng & Qi (2023), V yi V originally indicates the frequency of action and semelfactive verbs are least constrained.…”

Exploring the Variation of Third Tone Sandhi in Native Chinese Mandarin: An Acoustic Analysis

“…Furthermore, previous studies [12][13][14] [15] reviewed various rules in tone sandhi in Chinese languages in terms of the directionality sandhi system. In the realm of tone sandhi, one of the most interesting phenomena is the Tone 3 sandhi (T3).…”

Encoding category-level and context-specific phonological information at different stages: An EEG study of Mandarin third-tone sandhi word production

“…Even regarding tone sandhi, some recent research suggests that different processing mechanisms may be involved in the tone sandhi processing in other Chinese dialects (Chang et al, 2019;Chien et al, 2017;Yan et al, 2020Yan et al, , 2021. Moreover, the application of tone sandhi is also subject to other factors such as morphosyntactic structure and prosodic structure (Chen, 2000), and recent research suggests that the processing of disyllabic Mandarin T3 sandhi words with different morphological structures (e.g., lexical compounds vs. reduplication) may also differ (Gao et al, 2021). Future research should elucidate the processing of different types of phonological alternations and the interaction with other high-level linguistic factors including syntax and semantics and delineate the conditions or contexts that will affect the processing mechanisms.…”