1. Introduction
1.4 Neutral tone
1.4.1 Definition of neutral tone
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1.4 Preliminaries of neutral tone
In complex tonal languages such as Beijing Mandarin, F0 contours are utilized to lexically contrast every syllable, known as lexical tones. Yet syllables in unstressed positions, typically being grammatical morphemes, or the second syllable of certain disyllabic or trisyllabic words, may surface with none of the lexical tones; instead, they are referred to as having the so-called neutral tone, known in Chinese as qingsheng
‘light tone.’ The term neutral tone was first introduced by Chao in the 1920s to describe the pitch pattern of unstressed syllables in Beijing Mandarin which shows variability as a function of the preceding lexical tone (1932, 1933, 1968). To illustrate, the directional verb lai ‘to come’ bears the rising lexical tone [35] when it is stressed. As a post-verbal complement in guo-lai ‘to come over here’ and chu-lai ‘to come out, where it often gets destressed, lai has a neutral tone with a surface mid-to-low pitch and a surface high-to-mid pitch, respectively, depending on which lexical tone the preceding syllable is associated. Since the F0 realization of neutral tone is largely determined by the lexical tone of the preceding syllable, a neutral-toned syllable is traditionally considered toneless/ targetless (Yip 1980; Wang 2000, 2003; Li 2004) or “unspecified for tone” (Duanmu 2000) in phonological terms.
In one word, stresslessness and tonelessness are generally accepted to be the intrinsic characteristics of neutral tone. In the remainder of this section, however, I will argue that, although stresslessness indeed catches the nature of neutral tone, tonelessness is better to be replaced by complete (paradigmatic) neutralization. Besides, a preliminary formalization of neutral tone based on the currently proposed definition is also attained.
1.4.1 Definition of neutral tone
Since the initialization of Chao (1968), a cover term such as “stresslessness” or the like
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has often been used to explain why underlying tones are lost or neutralized in neutral-toned syllables. The idea is that neutral-neutral-toned syllables usually have the phonetic properties which are regarded as the phonetic correlates associated with stresslessness.
One of the properties is shortened duration (probably the most-mentioned one as regards the nature of neutral tone). A substantial literature (Lin & Yan 1980; Cao 1986;
Chen & Xu 2006; Lee & Zee 2008; Hsieh & Chuang 2008; Chen 2015, among others) indicates that, at least for most Mandarin dialects, the mean duration of neutral-toned syllables is about 50%-60% of the full lexical-toned syllables. Another significant phonetic property of neutral tone for stresslessness is weak articulatory strength (Chen
& Xu 2006; Huang 2015). For example, Huang (2015) contends that neutral tone in Taiwan Mandarin, though not consistently shortened, is still “unaccented” because its articulatory strength is weaker than the full lexical tones in the similar pitch range.
Taken together, neutral-toned syllables are often realized with clear acoustic reductions.
Specifically, at the segmental level, vowels in neutral-toned syllables are often centralized, devoiced, or even elided (Zadoenko 1958; Chao 1968; Cheng 1973; Gao 1980; Lin and Yan 1980, 1990; Lin 1983; Cao 1986; Chen 1986; Li 1990; Yang 1991;
Duanmu 2000; Wang 2004; Lee and Zee 2008). Tonal neutralization is therefore nothing but a sign of reduction motivated by stresslessness at the tonal level (Hsieh &
Chuang 2008).
As regards the processing of tonal neutralization itself, the view has been widely held that neutral-toned syllables are toneless at some point during the derivation, because it can better account for the variable surface pitch pattern and its dependency on the preceding lexical tones. To illustrate this point, let us consider two types of neutral tones in derivational terms. The first type, as depicted in (1), is inherent neutral tone, which refers to the case where syllables are always neutral-toned, even in
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supposedly stressed positions. That is, they have lexicalized the status of being neutral-toned. Morphemes of this type in Beijing Mandarin include the sentence-final particles, such as ba, and ma, and the possessive marker de, among many others. These syllables have no lexical tones and thus are analyzed as underlyingly toneless.
Consequently, the last resort for the toneless syllable to surface with some pitch is either spreading from the preceding lexical tone (Yip 1980), or from the interpolation between the preceding lexical tone and a boundary tone (represented as T%, see Li 2003). Either way, tonelessness serves as a motivation for the mechanism deriving the surface pitch pattern of inherent neutral tone.
(13) Inherent neutral tone: underlying tonelessness
The other type of neutral tone is non-inherent, as sketched in (14). Take for example the directional verbs lai ‘to come’ and qu ‘to go’ in Beijing Mandarin. These verbs are underlyingly specified for tone in citation, the former being [35] and the latter [51], whereas as an unstressed post-verbal complement in chu-lai ‘to come out’ and chu-qu
‘to go out,’ their tonal contrast are neutralized through two stages: tone loss in unstressed positions and tonal spreading/interpolation. In this case, the tonelessness of non-inherent neutral tone is not underlying, in contrast to the case of inherent neutral tone in (13); rather, the tonelessness of non-inherent neutral tone is derived as a result of stresslessness, and it is this derived tonelessness that feeds the tonal
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does. In other words, tonelessness, in conjunction with stresslessness, contribute to the surface pitch pattern of non-inherent neutral tone.
(14) Non-inherent neutral tone: derived tonelessness
Note that in both cases (13) and (14), tonelessness is never a surface-true statement.
Especially in the latter case (14), the derived tonelessness in unstressed syllables is at an intermediate stage in the derivation. Therefore, this non-surface true tonelessness will run into difficulties fitting in with a surface-oriented non-derivational framework, such as Optimality Theory (henceforth OT). Specifically, the only mechanism in OT that can capture tonelessness derived in weak positions is positional markedness, as indicated in the constraint ranking: *TONE/σ̆ ≫ MAX(TONE), which prohibits unstressed syllables associated with a tone. And yet, this ranking wrongly rules out the surface form in (14), where the unstressed neutral-toned syllable is linked to the preceding lexical tone (and the boundary tone if it exists). This is why the previous accounts (e.g.
Li 2003) for the tonelessness in OT resort to positional faithfulness instead, along with an economy constraint (i.e. *STRUC): MAX(TONE)/ˈσ ≫ *STRUC (TONE) ≫ MAX(TONE).
Despite the applicability, this approach is still far from flawless in two regards. First, it attributes the derived tonelessness in (14) to the effect of * STRUC(TONE), failing to capture the insight in the derivation that the derived tonelessness is motivated by stresslessness. Second, as Gouskova (2003) argues, the economy constraints like
*STRUC(TONE) should be excluded from CON, given the principle that “for every
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(Gouskova 2003:17) Accordingly, we may say that tonelessness, more precisely the derived tonelessness, is incompatible with a surface-oriented theory like OT.
Besides the theoretical incompatibility, the tonelessness account also acts counter to experimental results that the F0 realization of neutral tone does exhibit its own tonal target (e.g. Chen & Xu 2006 for Beijing Mandarin; Huang 2018 for Taiwan Mandarin;
Li & Chen 2019 for Tianjin Mandarin). For example, in Chen & Xu (2006), the number of neutral-toned syllables was manipulated from one to three. Their results showed that, when there was only one neutral-toned syllable, the F0 realization of neutral tone was varied greatly as a function of previous full lexical tones. In contrast, as the number of neutral-toned syllables increased, the F0 realization of neutral tone showed a clear tendency of merging into a stable mid-low target of its own, regardless of the preceding and following full lexical tones. The authors argue that, due to occurring in unstressed positions, neutral tone in Beijing Mandarin is implemented with much weaker articulatory strength compared to the full lexical tones. Therefore, neutral tone is less effective in overcoming the influence of the surrounding full lexical tones, and also takes more than one neutral-toned syllable to approach its tonal target, resulting in more surface F0 variability observed in the neutral-tone realization.
Given both the theoretical problems and the experimental evidence, I propose a new definition for neutral tones based on surface-orientedness, in replacement of the non-surface true “tonelessness” view, as stated below.
(15) Surface-oriented definition of neutral tones a. Neutral-toned syllables are unstressed.
b. The lexical tones are completely (paradigmatically) neutralized in neutral-toned syllables.
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c. Neutral-tone realization is acquired by:
i. The influence of surrounding tones; and/or ii. The emergence of a (default) reduced tone.
Note that this definition disassociates neutral tone from shorter duration and weaker energy. That is to say, neutral tone can be characteristic of the two properties, and yet neither of these properties are sufficient or necessary to define whether it is a neutral tone or not. Consequently, neutral tone in this dissertation comprises not only the typical type as in Beijing Mandarin, which is shorter and weaker, it also covers a few cases that is traditionally termed tonal neutralization. For example, the default or variable tonal manifestation of (some) sentence-final particles in Cantonese and Hakka Chinese, and the tone loss and spreading/redistribution of the preceding tone involved in normal tone sandhi in Shanghainese. These cases are under the scope of neutral tone in this dissertation because they involve stresslessness, complete neutralization of paradigmatic contrast, and the surface pitch in these cases is acquired by spreading of the offset of the preceding full tone, emergence of a default reduced form, or association with the boundary tone.
1.5 Language background
There are five Chinese dialects/languages investigated in this dissertation, each representing one of the major Sinitic families. Cantonese is the prestige variety of Yue Chinese originating from the city of Guangzhou. Miaoli Sixian Hakka is the prevailing subdialect of Northern Sixian Hakka spoken in Miaoli County, Taiwan. Standard Mandarin is the official language in both mainland China and Taiwan, and is thus the
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representative of Mandarin Chinese. Taiwanese is a famous variety of Southern Min Chinese in Taiwan, and Shanghainese is the best-known dialect of (northern) Wu Chinese.
(16) Languages investigated
Languages/dialects Affiliations Distribution Miaoli Sixian Hakka Hakka Chinese (Northern) Taiwan
Cantonese Yue Chinese Guangdong, Hong Kong
Standard Mandarin Mandarin Chinese Mainland China, Taiwan Taiwanese (Southern) Min Chinese Taiwan, Xiamen
Shanghainese (Northern) Wu Chinese Shanghai
Note in particular that Standard Mandarin comprises two varieties in this dissertation.
One is known as Putonghua (普通話), which is the standard version in mainland China.
The other is called Guoyu (國語), a variety of Standard Mandarin localized in Taiwan.
I will distinguish the two where necessary by dubbing the former mainland “Standard Mandarin” and the latter “Taiwan Mandarin.” This contrast is important because the two varieties show differences in the patterns of neutral tones that are significant to the current analyses.
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Grammaticalization
2.1 Prosodic licensing by edge-alignment
In virtually all the prosodic analyses making use of Match theory or its predecessors, it is usually taken for granted in the syntax-phonology mapping principles that there is a conventional dichotomy between lexical and functional categories. Only members of lexical categories can uniformly assume the status of an independent prosodic constituent. Members of functional categories exhibit a much more erratic pattern cross-linguistically, generally corresponding to more than one prosodic type which allegedly follows straightforward from differences in their syntactic distribution.
However, this dichotomy does not hold generally in the case which serves as a basis of this dissertation, that of Chinese dialects. In a range of branches of Chinese family, there are certain dialects, such as those in Yue Chinese and Hakka, where functional elements are as prosodically robust as lexical elements in terms of tonal phonology, and hence no need to distinguish between the two categories. On the other hand, in many Chinese dialects, including Standard Mandarin, words of functional category correspond to two prosodic classes with respect to particular phonological processes, prosodically prominent function words on the one hand, and prosodically non-prominent function words on the other. Members of the former class are parsed into the prosodic hierarchy on a par with words of lexical categories, that is, assuming a prosodically salient status by inclusion in a crucial prosodic constituent. This salience protects them from particular phonological reduction. In contrast, the class of
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prominent function words is characterized by absence of such salience due to its being excluded from the very prosodic constituent; therefore, members of this class are closer than those of the prominent class to what is traditionally defined as function words in the sense that they are reduced in form and/or eligibility for taking part in normal phonology. Significantly, the two classes of function words in Chinese dialects exhibit a considerable overlap in their morphosyntactic distributions. This case, together with the former one, where the lexical/functional contrast is unavailable, jointly calls for a more sophisticated system to deal with the function words which fare the same way as lexical ones in prosody, while keeping the distinction between lexical category and (phonologically reduced) functional category.
In this dissertation, I propose a formal mechanism that not only captures the two prosodic asymmetries empirically attested ‒ the asymmetry between words of lexical and functional categories, and between the two prosodic classes of functional elements
‒ but also accommodates the situation where there is no asymmetry at all. The core of the proposal is as follows. In principle, the interface grammar grants words of functional category a correspondent in the prosodic structure which is equivalent to that of words of lexical category, contra the convention in the literature. Nevertheless, the correspondents of these categories does not fare alike generally with respect to the prosodic markedness. While lexical correspondent is always prosodically well-formed, the correspondent of functional category is prone to be incompatible with the prosodic structure, and the incompatibility of the two prosodic classes of functional elements differs in an implicational way: if it is illegitimate for the non-prominent class to have a correspondent, then so is it for the prominent class, not vice versa. In other words, lexical category and the two classes of functional elements are in a ordering relation, forming. This can be schematically represented by a hierarchy regarding prosodic
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salience, as in (1), with lexical category at the most salient end, the non-prominent function word at the opposite end, and the prominent function word in between, where
“A › B” is read as “A is more salient than B,” the details of which will be discussed in the next section.
(1) Lexical word › prominent function word › non-prominent function word
The conception is cast in Optimality Theory by a set of interface constraints, following the revised version of Match Theory argued by Ito and Mester (2019), as laid out below.
(2) Interface constraints
Let S be an input syntactic representation and P its corresponding output phonological representation.
a. SP-MAX(α, π): Assign a violation mark for every constituent of type α with phonological content in S that does not correspond to some constituent of type π in P.
b. ALIGN-L/R(π, α): Assign a violation mark for every constituent of type π that is not left- or right-aligned with its corresponding constituent of type α in S.
This system principally consists of two well-known families of constraints. The SP-MAX in (2a) is a faithfulness constraint requiring Syntax-to-Prosody Maximality, and as such, it differs from the generally adopted MATCH constraint, according to Ito and Mester (2019), in having a purely existential conception. That is, for an element given in the input syntactic representation, SP:MAX insists merely on the existence of some
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corresponding prosodic constituent in the output phonological representation, rather than on exact correspondence, which is enforced by the other SP-faithfulness constraints. What is crucial is that this existential correspondence constraint is indifferent to whether the input element belongs to lexical category or functional category. The potential asymmetry between the categories is then governed by the Prosody-to-Syntax edge Alignment in (2b), the other family of constraints that principally makes up our system, which requires an output prosodic constituent in alignment on one side of some particular type of syntactic constituent. To capture the ordering effect in hierarchy (1), the value of the variable α for edge alignment in (2b) refers to contiguous ranges in the hierarchy, resulting in a set of stringency constraints (see De Lacy 2002), as illustrated in the following tableau, where “ω” stands for prosodic word, “Lex” for lexical word, “FncPrm” for prominent function words,
“FncNonPrm” for non-prominent function words, and “X0” for morphosyntactic word.
(3) Edge Alignment with stringency formulation ALIGN-R
With these two sets of constraints, the different mapping status can be treated as a result of the interaction of the SP-faithfulness and the stringent edge Alignment. The permutation of these two families of constraints produces the typology in (4), including the asymmetry between lexical and functional categories (4c), the asymmetry between the two classes of functional words (4b), and even no asymmetry (4a). As we can see, the conventional lexical/functional dichotomy arises as long as ALIGN-R(ω, Lex) is ranked above SP:MAX-X0. If SP:MAX-X0 is undominated, there is no asymmetry
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available, lexical and functional categories are equally salient by assuming the same prosodic status. With SP-MAX-X0 above ALIGN-R(ω, Lex), while being dominated by ALIGN-R(ω, Lex-FncPrm), the asymmetry between the two classes of function words is observed.
(4) Factorial typology
language Type Grammar
a. (ω Lex)(ω FncPrm) (ω FncNonPrm) SP:MAX-X0 ≫ ALIGN-R(ω, Lex), ALIGN-R(ω, Lex-FncPrm)
b. (ω Lex)(ω FncPrm) FncNonPrm ALIGN-R(ω, Lex-FncPrm), ≫SP:MAX-X0 ≫ ALIGN-R(ω, Lex)
c. (ω Lex) FncPrm FncNonPrm ALIGN-R(ω, Lex-FncPrm), ALIGN-R(ω, Lex) ≫ SP:MAX-X0
ALIGN-R(ω, Lex) ≫SP:MAX-X0 ≫ ALIGN -R(ω, Lex-FncPrm)
2.2 Conflation of grammaticality1
One might think that the subclasses of function words, namely the prominent function words and the non-prominent function words, is as arbitrary as the subcategorization approach, in the sense that the classification appears to be stipulated based on nothing but the phonological behavior of function words, and that members of the two classes may be different from one dialect to another. This inconsistency is shown in table (5), which gives a cross-dialectal summary of the members of the two prosodic classes within functional category, based on the (non-)application of tonal reduction. As we can see, the prominent class contains the largest range of distinct types of function words in Sixian Hakka, but the smallest range in Shanghai. The non-prominent class
1 The term designates the degree of grammaticalization in Lehmann’s (2015) sense.
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(5) Prominent and non-prominent function words
NUM2 PHA CL PRO DIR ASP MOD SFP
Sixian Hakka Prm NonPrm
Taiwan Mandarin Prm NonPrm
Southern Min Prm NonPrm
Shanghainese Prm NonPrm
NUM = Numerals PHA = Phasal complements
CL = Classifiers PRO = Object pronouns
DIR = Directional complements ASP = Aspect markers
MOD = Modifier markers SFP = Sentence final particles
Prm = Prominent function words NonPrm = Non-prominent function words
Inconsistent and variable as it appears, the classification is clearly implicational. In other words, these distinct types of function words form an implicational hierarchy. The reduction of a given type in the scale entails the reduction of all the types to its left.
Inconsistent and variable as it appears, the classification is clearly implicational. In other words, these distinct types of function words form an implicational hierarchy. The reduction of a given type in the scale entails the reduction of all the types to its left.