Jingtao Sun

Fission Reduplication in Modern Chinese Dialects

There is a common phenomenon in Chinese, from Old Chinese down through modern dialects, in which a monosyllabic word phonologically and semantically corresponds to a disyllabic word. Here are three examples from the Xin’an 新安 dialect: tjəw 33 丟 ‘carry, lift’ ti33 ljəwo ‘lift (something to throw it away), detain’; 2) ʨjaw 33 焦 ‘coke, burned things’; ʨi33 ljawo ‘dregs of fat’; 3) xuŋ53 哄 ‘fool, humbug’ xu 53 luŋ o ‘fool, palm something off on’. 2 Scholars have been interested in this phenomenon for a long time, and they have identified many instances of it through history. Over the past several decades, the research on this phenomenon has progressed, not only in data collection, but also in attempts to account for the phenomenon. In my previous paper (Sun 2004), I dealt with the case in Old Chinese. The present paper aims at investigating and analyzing the same phenomenon in modern Chinese dialects. There are three objectives in this paper: the first is to analyze the data collected from modern Chinese dialects to explore the nature of this phenomenon; the second is to develop a generative theory of morpho-phonological interaction to account for the formation of this reduplication pattern, and the third is to make a comparison across modern dialects with respect to the form alternation.

Generalization of Meaning and Debuccalization

Debuccalization of initial consonant is sometimes phonologically conditioned, and sometimes determined by other causes. This paper is an attempt to investigate the latter case, finding in Chinese dialects that some single cases of debuccalization are actually caused by the combined influences of meaning generalization and phonological conditioning. After analyzing the debuccalization of kh-, th-, s- and ʂ-, this paper also makes an investigation into the reason why this is the case.

Progressive Reduplication in Old Chinese

On the basis of an extensive investigation into ancient texts, this paper analyzes the semantic motivation and the corresponding phonological alternation in the process of changing from a monosyllabic form to a disyllabic form, discovering that there is a progressive pattern of reduplication in Old Chinese, which mainly conveys either diminutive meaning or vivid description. This research has been carried out based on the following principles: 1) pay close attention to the interaction between phonology and morphology; 2) try to recover the particular semantic relationship between the base and the reduplication form; 3) seek both phonological and sematic conditions for the derivational liquid consonant as well as its variants; 4) make comparison with the parallel cases in modern dialects; 5) make use of achievements in the phonological research of Old Chinese.