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In total reduplication in Mandarin onomatopoeia, the reduplicant syllable can be related to the base syllable completely. In addition, almost every reduplicant is next to the base undergoes rightward reduplication. The rightward reduplication copies at least one syllable of the base and the reduplicant is affixed toward the right edge of the prosodic word (Chang 1998, Adelaar 2000, etc). Nevertheless, there is one reduplicant A which in ABAB pattern does not undergo rightward reduplication. It will be discussed in a later section with an explanation.
Partial reduplication of Mandarin onomatopoeia represents a case of fixed
segmentism in reduplication, where the /i/ and /l/ always emerges as the nucleus and onset of the reduplicant.
1.2. Mandarin core lexicon and Mandarin onomatopoeia reduplication
Onomatopoeia is taken as a peripheral part in Mandarin Chinese. Mandarinonomatopoeia has special characteristics compared with core lexicon such as nouns, verbs and adjectives. The characteristics can be shown in the reduplication process and are the central point in this thesis. Also, the characteristics similar to core lexicon shown in reduplication are the main issue in my analysis.
In Mandarin Chinese, reduplication takes the form of a total one, which is also one of the most common morphological operations. Reduplication may mark plurality but also has other semantic or pragmatic effects. Much previous research looked not only into the semantic, grammatical and syntactic functions in the reduplication of
Mandarin verbs and adjectives, but also at the formal aspects of the reduplication of the Mandarin core lexicon. However, the formal analysis of Mandarin onomatopoeia reduplication has not been treated with the proper attention.
The principle and mechanisms proposed in previous studies for the reduplication of
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Mandarin verbs and adjectives, as well as the account of Mandarin onomatopoeia formation presented below will reveal theoretically significant similarities among OT analysis. The morphological difference between the Mandarin core lexicon and Mandarin onomatopoeia also deserves special attention. Unlike adjective and verb reduplication, Mandarin onomatopoeia involves fixed segmentism during the process of reduplication. As a consequence, a fixed segmentism in the reduplication process is required to generate well-formed Mandarin onomatopoeia.
This research project will be implemented in a step-by-step manner. First I will analyze how Mandarin disyllabic onomatopoeia is generated. The input of partial Mandarin disyllabic onomatopoeias will be assumed the source of monosyllabic ones.
The input for other Mandarin disyllabic onomatopoeia will be supposed as different disyllabic forms. Then the Mandarin disyllabic onomatopoeia will be taken as the input to generate trisyllabic patterns. Because there are two structures for Mandarin trisyllabic onomatopoeia, together with two distinct forms of analysis will be provided.
Finally, the Mandarin quadrisyllabic onomatopoeia is also generated from disyllabic ones. There are three different patterns in Mandarin quadrisyllabic onomatopoeia, and three different explanations for generation will be given.
(4) Generation process of Mandarin onomatopoeia
This thesis consists of four chapters and is organized as follows. Chapter 2 reviews Mandarin onomatopoeia
Monosyllabic pattern Disyllabic pattern
Disyllabic pattern
Trisyllabic pattern Quadrisyllabic pattern
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previous works on Mandarin onomatopoeia, Mandarin reduplication and the
theoretical background related to Mandarin onomatopoeia and reduplication. Chapter 3 discusses the generation of Mandarin disyllabic onomatopoeia and will provide an explanation of the various structures of the disyllabic patterns. The fixed segmentism in reduplication process will be major issue also. Moreover, how Mandarin disyllabic Mandarin extends into trisyllabic ones will be analyzed in Chapter 3 as well. Chapter 4 describes the process of the generation of Mandarin quadrisyllabic onomatopoeia.
Three different structures used in the reduplication of Mandarin quadrisyllabic onomatopoeia‘s will be looked at. The fixed segmentism and the input form for quadrisyllabic pattern analysis will also be studied in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 sums up the phonological analysis of Mandarin onomatopoeia. This thesis also illustrates the categories and phonological structures of Mandarin onomatopoeia. Chapter 5 summarizes the similarities and difference in core lexicon and onomatopoeia in Mandarin Chinese investigated as well as the solutions under OT.
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CHAPTER 2
LITERATURE REVIEW
This chapter contains three sections. Section 1 reviews the Optimality Theory (OT).
Section 2 provides information from previous studies on reduplication in Mandarin Chinese and on Mandarin onomatopoeia. Section 3 discusses reduplication under OT and the constraints used.
2.1. Optimality Theory
2.1.1. Basic concept of OTOptimality Theory, which was first introduced by Prince and Smolensky (Prince &
Smolensky 1993/2004; McCarthy & Prince 1993a, 1993b, 1994, 1995, 1999), has aroused great interest in the study of phonology. OT is a development of Generative Grammar, a theory sharing its focus on the formal description and quest for universal principles on the basis of empirical research of linguistic typology and language acquisition. However, OT radically differs from the generative model and has the central idea that surface forms of language reflect resolutions of conflicts between constraints. The five basic tenets of OT are given below.
(5) Principles of Optimality Theory
a. UniversalityUG provides a set Con of constraints that are universal and universally present in all grammars.
b. Violability
Constraints are violable; but violation is minimal.
c. Ranking
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The constraints of Con are ranked on a language-particular basis; the notion of minimal violation is defined in terms of this ranking. A grammar is a ranking of the constraints set.
d. Inclusiveness
The constraints hierarchy evaluates a set of candidates analyzes that are admitted by very general considerations of structural well-formedness.
e. Parallelism
Best-satisfaction of the constraint hierarchy is computed over the whole
hierarchy and the whole candidate set. There is no serial derivation. (Other views are consistent with a-d, as well)
Universality is essential to the emergence of the unmarked (TETU), one of the main points in this thesis. Since structural constraints are universal and present in every grammar, even those that are obviously and commonly violated in a given language are predicted to be available to do their work under appropriate conditions. It needs to be noticed that Universality is hopeless without Violability and Ranking, in the face of the diversity of inter-linguistic variation seen in linguistic systems.
These principles must figure in a particular conception of how grammar is organized.
Universal grammar must minimally provide the following:
Con. The set of constraints out of which grammars are constructed.
Gen. A function defining for each possible input i, the range of candidate linguistic analyzes available to i.
Eval. A function that comparatively evaluate sets of forms with respect to a given constraint Γ, a ranking of Con.
The following schema sketches the way input-output pairing is accomplished using these notions. Suppose we have a grammarΓm, the mth ranking of Con, and an input
in
i— a lexical entry, if we are looking at word phonology.
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(6) Schema for an OT grammar
Gen (ini) = {cand1, cand2, …}Eval (Γm , {cand1, cand2, …} ) → (candk) This grammar pairs input ini with output candk.
The function Gen emits a set of candidate analyzes consistent with a given input. Gen consists of a very broad principle of linguistic forms, essentially limited to those that define the representational primitives and their most basic modes of combinations.
Eval deals with a system of ranked constraintsΓ: a formal construction on Con that yields the grammar of an individual language. It rates the members of the candidate set in terms of their relative harmony, or degree of success with respect to the language‘s ranking Γ of constraints. It imposes an order on the various candidates, and a maximally harmonic candidate is optimal. Such a candidate best-satisfies or minimally violates the grammar‘s constraint ranking. It is output associated by the grammar with the specific input ini. The various non-optimal candidates have no grammatical status; no direct inferences about plausible patterns of variation or historical changes can be drawn from their ordering. The constraint ranking for the Mandarin core lexicon is different from that of Mandarin onomatopoeia so that they have various phonological structures.
2.1.2. Constraint family in OT
Before coming to the discussion of actual constraints and their ranking in a specific situation, let us first find out in a general way about the five major forces embodied by constraints.
a. Faithfulness Constraint. It requires that outputs preserve the properties of their basic forms, requiring some kind of similarity between output and its input.
b. Markedness Constraint. It is a general denominator for grammatical factors that exert pressure toward unmarked types of structure. The markedness constraint
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requires that the output forms meet some criterion of structural well-formedeness.
c. Generalized Alignment Constraint. It was developed in the analysis of relation between syntactic constituents and prosodic phrases (McCarthy & Prince 1993b;
Kager 1999). Generalized Alignment Constraint serves the match between the edge of various linguistic constituents in prosodic category and grammatical category.
d. Anchoring Constraint (McCarthy & Prince 1993a, 1995a, b). It is member of the Faithfulness constraint family and be taken as positional faithfulness constraint.
The anchoring constraint serves to ensure that a certain edge of the reduplicant will correspond to a certain edge of the base.
e. Adjacency Constraint. Kitto & de Lacy (1999) proposed the BE-A
DJACENCY
constraint and tried to account for the tendency of copied epenthetic segments to be near the segment form which they have copied their features. A
DJACENCY
BR
requires the same of reduplicant segments. Thus, there potentially is a family of A
DJACENCY
constraints which are restricted to an output relation only, as any ADJACENCY
requirement in the input-output (IO) domain would be nonsensical.2.1.3 Cophonology
The cophonology approach, developed in Orgun (1996) and Anttila (1997), and much subsequent work, holds that within a single language there can be co-existing distinct phonological systems, indexed to such components of language as register, lexical class, morphological category, and most conspicuously in the context of this thesis, individual morphological construction. The cophonology approach‘s diversity is captured by associating morphological constructions or lexical classes with different phonological grammars, i.e., constraint rankings. All constraints within a given cophonology are fully general (e.g., M
AX
, the ban on deletion, or *COMP
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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.
2.3. Reduplication in Optimality Theory
From a purely morphological point of view, reduplication is simply a kind of affixation, both in its morpho-syntactic contribution (it forms morphological categories, such as plural), and in its linear position with respect to the stem (preceding it, as a prefix, or following it, as a suffix). But from a phonological viewpoint, the special property of reduplication is that the reduplication affix is not fully specified for segment content. Its segment content is copied from the stem that undergoes reduplication. Reduplication is therefore by its very nature a phenomenon involving the phonological identity between the reduplicant and the base to which it adjoins.
The Correspondence Theory of reduplication, which was put forward by McCarthy
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and Prince (McCarthy & Prince 1994a, b, 1995a,b), claims that reduplication patterns arise from the interaction of three constraint types.
a. Well-formedness constraints, encoding markednss principles
b. Faithfulness constraints, requiring lexical forms and surface forms to be identical c. Base-reduplicant-identity constraints, requiring identity between the reduplicant
and its base.
In ranking these three types of constraints, Correspondence Theory aims to explain the broad typological difference and similarities among patterns of reduplication in world languages, as well as the specific patterns of individual languages.
Correspondence Theory tries to manifest the interaction of well-formedness,
faithfulness and base-reduplicant identity underlying the patterns of reduplication in some languages.
This model, as depicted in Figure (1), has an input and output level. The input of the reduplication consists of a segmentally empty reduplicative affix, which is
abbreviated as Af
RED
or RED, plus the stem to which the affix adjoins. Input faithfulness constraints require that the input specifications of the stem be preserved in the output— the ‗base‘ of the base-reduplicant combination. Base-reduplicant identity constraints require that both parts of this output base-reduplicant combination be identical in some respect.
Not shown in this model are that two remaining constraint types which come into play in reduplication. Well-formedness constraints require that the output (base reduplicant) meet certain unmarked structures. Alignment constraints require that base and
Input: /Af RED +Stem/
Output: R B
IO-Faithfulness
(11) The Basic Model
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reduplicant be ‗glued‘ together along the edge of specific prosodic constituents.
In this thesis there are two general categories of constraints— Faithfulness and Markedness constraints. There are three sub-categories of Faithfulness constraints.
The first one is the Maxmality (M
AX
) constraint, which asks that the content of every input must correspond to the content of every output without deletion. The second one is the Dependency (DEP
) constraint, which requires that the content of every input must correspond to the content of every output without insertion. The third one is the Identity (IDENT
) constraint, which asks that every feature or value in content of the input and of the output must be identical without change (Prince & Smolemsky 1995, 1999).In this thesis I will analyze Mandarin disyllabic onomatopoeia first, and then discuss Mandarin trisyllabic onomatopoeia, and then Mandarin quadrisyllabic onomatopoeia.
The reduplication data of Mandarin disyllabic, trisyllabic and quadrisyllabic onomatopoeia are collected from Li‘s research (2007) and The Online Mandarin Dictionary of the Ministry of Education. The selected Mandarin onomatopoeia will be serach on Google for their official and non-official use in Modern Mandarin-speaking world and the numbers of results are shown in tables in later chapters. Those
Mandarin onomatopoeias are as welll taken as items for analysis and discussed under OT grammar.
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CHAPTER 3
MANDARIN DISYLLABIC AND TRISYLLABIC ONOMATOPOEIA
3.1 Mandarin Disyllabic Onomatopoeia
3.1.1 Some background informationMandarin onomatopoeia can be separated into four categories— monosyllabic, disyllabic, trisyllabic and quadrisyllabic patterns. According to Li (2007: 114-115), the disyllabic ones are the largest group1. The reason for this disyllabic tendency is that the basic prosodic unit (i.e., foot) in Modern Chinese is formatted by two syllables (Feng 2005: 61). Wang (2008:124) and Duanmu (2000, 2007) also take the disyllable as the basic metrical unit in Modern Chinese. When the disyllable is the most unmarked choice in Mandarin lexicon, this preference is also found in peripheral lexicons such as onomatopoeia.
The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. Section 3.1.2 overviews Mandarin disyllabic onomatopoeia and manifests its phonological character. Section 3.1.3 will show the category information of Mandarin disyllabic onomatopoeia. Section 3.1.4 will propose an OT analysis of Mandarin disyllabic onomatopoeia with monosyllabic input. Then, Section 3.1.5 begins an analysis of how disyllabic inputs generate
The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. Section 3.1.2 overviews Mandarin disyllabic onomatopoeia and manifests its phonological character. Section 3.1.3 will show the category information of Mandarin disyllabic onomatopoeia. Section 3.1.4 will propose an OT analysis of Mandarin disyllabic onomatopoeia with monosyllabic input. Then, Section 3.1.5 begins an analysis of how disyllabic inputs generate