Finally, we consider four other alternative interpretations to our results here, all of which were suggested by anonymous reviewers, to whom we are grateful.
An important alternative to consider is whether it is possible to treat Tone 3 as underlyingly 21 and insert a high pitch to the right when the tone occurs phrase-finally. The insertion of a pre- or post-[eT] is cross-linguistically attested, and referred to as a ‘ bounce ’ effect by Hyman (2007). The tone sandhi in the third-tone sandhi can then be considered as OCP avoidance, and the half-third sandhi as simply non-existent. The 21 underlying form for Tone 3 is a particularly attractive option for Taiwan Mandarin, in which Tone 3 is pronounced as 21 even in final position.
This position is technically workable for Beijing Mandarin, but difficult to defend from a typological perspective. First, Northern Chinese dialects, of which Mandarin is one, are known to have ‘ right-dominant ’ sandhis that protect domain-final tones and change non-final tones (Yue-Hashimoto 1987, Zhang 2007). It is not clear why Mandarin would be an exception.
Second, while contour simplification in non-final positions is extremely common cross-linguistically, contour complication, even in final position, is quite rare. Yue-Hashimoto’s (1987) typology of Chinese tone-sandhi systems identifies close to 100 cases of contour levelling or simplification, but only three cases of contour complication. It is not clear why we would want to entertain a typologically odd analysis when a better-attested op-tion is available. These points are also made in Zhang (2007 : 260).
The second alternative relates to our observation above that the third-tone sandhi is sensitive to syntactic information, while the half-third sandhi is not. Another manifestation of this is that the third-tone sandhi
12 An anonymous reviewer questions whether the lexical frequency differences be-tween Tone 2 and other tones are big enough to have noticeable effects in pro-ductivity. It is difficult, and possibly impractical, to quantify a minimum difference in lexical frequency that can elicit an effect on productivity. Studies that illustrate the effects of frequency on phonological productivity (e.g. Zuraw 2000, Ernestus &
Baayen 2003, Hayes & Londe 2006, Zhang & Lai 2008, Zhang et al. 2009a, b) and production (e.g. Bybee 2000, Jurafsky et al. 2001, Ernestus et al. 2006) typically use regression analyses or binary comparisons between high vs. low frequencies.
However, in Hayes & Londe’s (2006) study on variable backness harmony in Hungarian, a lower than 8 % harmony rate difference between two types of stems (N and NN, where N=neutral) in a web-based corpus translates into a comparable productivity difference in a wug test ; in Zhang & Lai’s (2008) and Zhang et al.’s (2009a, b) studies on tone-sandhi productivity in Taiwanese, type and token fre-quencies differences that are smaller than those observed here are also shown to correlate significantly with the productivity results.
sometimes does not apply across a [NP][VP] boundary, as shown in (5a) : the [li] syllable has the option of not undergoing the third-tone sandhi, thus giving a 21 21 sequence in the output. This makes the processing of the third-tone sandhi potentially more difficult, as the speaker needs to access the syntactic information in order to determine whether the third-tone sandhi should apply. However, the stimuli that we used in the experiments were all disyllabic, and 3+3 disyllabic sequences do not have the option of not undergoing the sandhi even if the syntactic configuration is [NP][VP], as shown in (5b). The syntactic information is therefore immaterial to the stimuli that we used in the experiments.
Third-tone sandhi in [NP][VP]
(5)
‘Old Li buys shoes.’
input
The third alternative is that the productivity difference stems from the nature of lexical listing, in that the third-tone sandhi is lexically listed, while the half-third sandhi is productively derived from markedness and faithfulness interactions in an OT grammar. This is consistent with the fact that the third-tone sandhi has a long history and thus may have a higher degree of lexicalisation. Therefore, even if the two sandhis do differ in their synchronic phonetic motivation, it is their difference in lexical listing that causes the productivity difference.
There are two arguments against this alternative. First, if the nature of lexical listing is truly different between the two sandhis, then we would expect the third-tone sandhi to be entirely unproductive and the half-third sandhi to be entirely productive, regardless of lexical frequency. However, we observed a gradient difference between the two sandhis, and the half-third sandhi is affected by lexical frequency. These gradient effects, we believe, are better captured by an analysis that is gradient in nature rather than one that imposes a categorical distinction between the two sandhis based on the presence vs. absence of lexical listing. Second, despite the long history of the third-tone sandhi, its application to disyllabic words in Mandarin is in fact exceptionless, just like the half-third sandhi.
13 The adjective [xAu] ‘ good ’ is traditionally treated as an adjectival verb in Chinese syntax (see Li & Thompson 1981).
Therefore, learners of Mandarin cannot conclude purely from input stat-istics that the former has a higher degree of lexicality than the latter. In order to reach this conclusion, it seems that the learner still has to access the phonetic nature of the sandhis, indicating the synchronic relevance of phonetics.
The final alternative capitalises on the observation that the subjects produced the half-third sandhi after hearing only one full Tone 3 in w1 position followed by a different tone, but produced the third-tone sandhi after hearing two identical full third tones. It is thus possible that the production of the third-tone sandhi is influenced by a greater perceptual perseveration effect from the input than that of the half-third sandhi, which causes the nonce syllable in w1 position of 3+3 to have more characteristics of Tone 3.
Although this approach correctly predicts incomplete neutralisation in both real and wug words (see note 5 for results on incomplete neutralisa-tion between 3+3 and 2+3 in real word producneutralisa-tions), it cannot predict the differencebetween them, as it is not clear why the perceptual perseveration effect should be stronger for wug words than for real words. But more importantly, the approach assumes tone priming irrespective of segmental content, as it assumes that the two third tones both have an effect on the subjects’ production of Tone 3 affected by sandhi, even though the second syllable has completely different segmental contents from the syllable undergoing sandhi. However, whether tone by itself is an effective prime in a tone language is a controversial issue. Although Cutler & Chen (1995) show that tone and segments in Cantonese behave similarly as primes for lexical decision, other studies on Mandarin (Chen et al. 2002, Lee 2007) and Cantonese (Yip et al. 1998, Yip 2001) show that priming effects in lexical decision and production latency are only found when the prime and the target share either segmental contents or segmental contents and tone.
Tone by itself is an ineffective prime. This casts further doubt on the workability of this alternative.
6 Conclusion
In this paper, we have proposed a novel research paradigm to test the relevance of phonetics to synchronic phonology – wug testing of patterns differing in phonetic motivations that coexist in the same language. By directly addressing existing native patterns and allowing easier control of confounding factors such as lexical frequency, the wug-test paradigm provides evidence which converges with other research paradigms that have been used to test this issue, such as the study of phonological ac-quisition in a first language and the artificial language paradigm. The language we used was Mandarin Chinese, which has two tone-sandhi patterns which differ in their degrees of phonetic motivation, and our wug tests showed that Mandarin speakers applied the sandhi with a stronger phonetic motivation, the half-third sandhi, to wug words with a greater
accuracy than the phonetically more opaque sandhi, the third-tone sandhi, thus supporting the direct relevance of phonetics to synchronic phonology. We also showed that lexical frequency is relevant to the application of the half-third sandhi in wug words, as reflected in the lower accuracy of the sandhi in the 3+2 environment. However, lexical fre-quency alone cannot account for the low sandhi accuracy of 3+3, as the sandhi tone differences between real and wug words are more consistent for 3+3 than 3+2, even though 3+2 has a lower lexical frequency.
We recognise that our position that phonetics, likely in the form of substantive biases, is part of the design feature of grammar construction complicates the search for phonological explanations in the following sense : it potentially creates a duplication problem for patterns whose explanation may come from either substantive bias or misperception ; how, then, does one tease apart which is the true explanatory factor ? This problem is pointed out by Hansson (2008 : 886), for example. We surmise that the answer will not come from individual cases for which the expla-nation may truly be ambiguous, but from comprehensive experimental studies on many different patterns to establish which approach makes better predictions on both the speakers’ internal knowledge and the evolu-tion of these patterns in general. Therefore, the study reported here can simply be viewed as food for future research into the phonetics–phonology relationship. To conduct similar studies, we need the two patterns under comparison to satisfy the following conditions : (a) they have comparable triggering environments, (b) they are of comparable productivity in the native lexicon, (c) they have comparable frequencies of occurrence in the native lexicon and (d) they differ in their degrees of phonetic motivation.
There are many other Chinese dialects, especially the Wu and Min dialects, that have considerably more intricate patterns of tone sandhi than Mandarin, and we often find differences in the degree of phonetic motiva-tion among the sandhi patterns in these dialects. We hope that our study on Mandarin will lead to similar research in other Chinese dialects, which will make further contributions to the phonetics–phonology interface debate.
Starting from Hsieh’s seminal works on wug-testing Taiwanese tone sandhi, the productivity of complicated tone-sandhi patterns has been a long-standing question in Chinese phonology. This is especially true for patterns involving phonological opacity (e.g. the tone circle in Southern Min ; see Chen 2000 for examples) and syntactic dependency (e.g. the different sandhi patterns that subject-predicate and verb-object com-pounds undergo in Pingyao ; see Hou 1980). We hope that our research will inspire more psycholinguistic testing of these patterns that will shed light on this question. Some results on how sandhi productivity is gradi-ently influenced by phonological opacity have already been obtained for Taiwanese (Zhang & Lai 2008, Zhang et al. 2009a, b).
Finally, our results here shed additional light on the nature of gradience in phonology. Not only are the phonetic and frequency effects observed here gradient, they are gradient in an interesting way : the sandhis may
apply to all wug words, but they apply incompletely in that the sandhi tone bears more resemblance to the base tone than the sandhi tone in real words. This complements well-attested gradient effects whereby a phonological pattern only applies to a certain percentage of the exper-imental test items.14 This observation is both methodologically and theoretically significant : methodologically, it further demonstrates the importance of careful acoustic studies, which can reveal phonological patterns that have hitherto escaped our attention ; theoretically, it forces us to rethink theoretical models of phonology, which need to provide a viable explanation for the multiple layers of gradience.
Appendix: Additional test-stimuli information
For AO-AO words, we controlled both the frequency and the mutual information score for the disyllables, using Da (1998)’s Feng Hua Yuan character and digram frequency corpus, which contains 4,718,131 characters and 4,159,927 digrams.
All AO-AO disyllables fall within the raw frequency (raw number of occurrence) range of 31–62, and are relatively common words. The mutual information score is calculated as:
1 AO-AO
where p(x, y) represents the digram frequency, and p(x) and p(y) represent the frequencies of the two characters respectively. A higher mutual information score indicates a higher likelihood for the two characters to co-occur, and hence to form real words. All AO-AO words fall within the range of 8–17 for the mutual information score, indicating that all these digrams are common words.
Da (1998) provides the following guidelines on how to interpret mutual information scores: a score greater than 3 indicates that the two words have a strong collocation, a score less than 1 indicates that they are unlikely to be related and a score between 1 and 3 is in the grey area. For more information on mutual information scores, see Oakes (1998).
I(x, y)=log2 ºp(x, y)º p(x)p(y)
This appendix provides additional information and complete word lists for the five word groups (AO-AO, *AO-AO, AO-AG, AG-AO and AG-AG) and the fillers used in the experiments.
14 As one anonymous reviewer suggests, whether any predictions can be made about the nature of gradience in productivity is an independently interesting question.
Previous work has shown that it may be influenced by multiple factors, including the nature of the gradience in the lexicon (Zuraw 2000, 2007, Hayes & Londe 2006, Pierrehumbert 2006, among others) and phonological opacity (Zhang & Lai 2008, Zhang et al. 2009a, b). But more empirical research is needed to identify both the factors and the mechanism with which the factors interact with each other.
3+1
‘to spin and weave’
‘free and easy’
2 *AO-AO
4 AG-AO
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