Mandarin Chinese reduplication and Mandarin onomatopoeia

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ban on complex onset); and morphonological differentiation of phonological patterns results from different ranking of the constraints across cophonologies.

In Mandarin onomatopoeia, several morphological constructions can occur and the same input form can generate various output forms. This phenomenon can be explained by a cophonology approach since there are many phonological grammar/constraint rankings in the generation of Mandarin onomatopoeia.

2.1.4 The emergence of the unmarked

Under the OT rubric of the emergence of the unmarked (McCarthy and Prince, 1994a), which provides a way to allow only unmarked structures in a domain like reduplicant while permitting the corresponding marked structure to occur elsewhere in the

language. The idea is that non-copying of a base segment, with substitution of some fixed, default segment, decreases phonological markedness.

If a given markedness constraint M crucially dominates an appropriate faithfulness constraint F (and no constraint dominating M somehow vitiates its force), then no M-offending structure will appear in a surface form, even at the expense of

imperfectly reproducing some underlying forms. If we rank constraints in the other way and faithfulness takes precedence, so that the M-offending structure can be found in surface forms. Differences in ranking give differences in activity of markedness constraints, so it is possible to say that every constraint is present in the grammar of every language, though if a constraint is crucially dominated, its activity may be limited or non-existent. The limited but nonetheless visible activity of dominated markedness constraints is essential to the theory of fixed segmentism (Alderete et al.

1999).

2.2. Mandarin Chinese reduplication and Mandarin onomatopoeia

A typical word in Chinese, including Mandarin, is not made of component parts but is

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a single morpheme. Therefore, Chinese has been referred as an isolating language because of its general less complexity in word formation. Due to this simplicity in Mandarin word structure, the reduplication process, which is regarded as a kind of affixation, morphologically turns out to be a copy operation of the original morpheme as a whole. Similarly, from a phonological view point, segmental content is copied from the base form as well.

The purpose of reduplication, a common phenomenon in Mandarin Chinese, is to give a more vivid meaning to the original adjective (Chao, 1968) or else modify its degree of intensity or reduction. Mandarin lexicons increase the degree of intensity by reduplication, such as with Mandarin adjectives. On the other hand, they also reduce the degree of intensity by reduplication, such as with Mandarin verbs. Examples of reduplication in the Mandarin core lexicons, such as for total reduplication are given below (Chen, 2007).

(7) Reduplication of nouns (kinship terms)

(8) Reduplication of measure words

ba-ba 爸爸 ‗father‘ ma-ma 媽媽 ‗mother‘

ge-ge 哥哥 ‗elder brother‘ di-di 弟弟 ‗younger brother‘

ye-ye 爺爺 ‗paternal grandpa‘ nai-nai 奶奶 ‗paternal grandma‘

jian-jian yifu 件件衣服 ‗every dress‘

zuo-zuo shan 座座山 ‗every mountain‘

zhang-zhang zhi 張張紙 ‗every sheet of paper‘

ke-ke shu 棵棵樹 ‗every tree‘

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(9) Reduplication of verbs

( 10) Reduplication of adjectives

To take the reduplication of Mandarin adjectives as an example, it may occur as disyllabic, trisyllabic and quadrisyllabic compounds— may seen to be highly diverse.

The generalization for Mandarin disyllabic reduplication made by Lien (1989) and Tang (1988) is that co-ordinate compounds are the most productive types. However, Chiang (1992) pointed out that there are more Mandarin words than co-ordinated compounds can be productively reduplicated to the same extent. Chiang also claimed that all affixes in Mandarin adjective reduplication as suffixes which are attached to the prosodic base, in contrary to the traditional assumption that affixes can be taken as infixes and prefixes under the model of prosodic morphology.

The previous researches on Mandarin onomatopoeia focused on rhetoric, lexical category and syntactic structure, such as Wang (1985) who studied Mandarin onomatopoeia in a rhetorical degree and did not take it as a lexical category. Only recently have some researchers, such as Zhu (1995) and Li (2007), mentioned the phonological character of Mandarin onomatopoeia. Zhu noticed the large numbers of /l/ as onset in Mandarin onomatopoeia and other Chinese dialects. Except for the traditional statement, Li proposed statistics for Mandarin onomatopoeia. She provided

shou-shou 說說 ‗say a little‘

zou-zou 走走 ‗walk a little‘

piping-piping 批評批評 ‗criticize a little‘

zhuyi-zhuyi 注意注意 ‗pay a little attention‘

hong de 紅的 ‗red‘ hong-hong de 紅紅的 ‗very red‘

chengshi 誠實 ‗honest‘ cheng-cheng-shi-shi 誠誠實實 ‗very honest‘

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the information that there are many stops in Mandarin onomatopoeia as well as numerous laterals shown as onset in the even syllable. However, there needs to be an analysis to explain these special phonological structures.

Chiang(1992) proposed that onomatopoeia sometimes violate phonological structure of the language in which they occur due to their special function as sound-imitating icons, hence they belong to the peripheral rather than core phonology. The formation of Mandarin onomatopoeia is identical to that of the Mandarin core lexicons.

Nevertheless, Mandarin onomatopoeias involve fixed material at the segment level.

As s consequence, a replacement process is required to generate well-formed onomatopoetic words. That process is assumed to be Melodic Overwriting here (McCarthy and Prince, 1990). When Melodic Overwriting happens, the

Recoverability Principle and the Strong Domain Hypothesis also work in the reduplication process as well so that Mandarin onomatopoeia follows Universal Grammar rather than Mandarin-specific rules.