Aspects of segmental phonology and Chinese syllable structure
The syllable has been recognized as a prosodic unit as demonstrated in the work of Kahn (1976), Steriade (1982), Levin (1985), McCarthy and Prince (1986), and Ito (1986), among others. However, the exact composition of the syllable is still controversial. The theory of Prosodic Morphology and Phonology recognizes the prosodic units of Prosodic Word, Foot, Syllable, and Mora (McCarthy and Prince 1986, Ito 1986, Zec 1988), but not the syllable internal unit of Rime. The goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate that syllable internal organization is hierarchical and the organizational unit Rime should be incorporated into the Prosodic Hierarchy. This dissertation presents a case study of Mandarin segmental morphology and phonology which covers the areas of (i) the analysis of derived mid vowels, (ii) distributional constraints on syllable structure, (iii) pre-specified reduplication patterns found in Mandarin-based language games, and (iv) phonological alternations found in the Beijing $\tau$-suffixation process, to argue that the syllable template of a language can be more than just a canonical form; it can be a fixed structure which must be fully instantiated in each surface syllable.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign