The avoidance of the third tone sandhi in Mandarin Chinese

An optimality-theoretic analysis of third tone sandhi (TS) domains of Mandarin is proposed in preference to other approaches. This constraint-based analysis provides a descriptively better solution to questions such as why it is possible for a preposition to resist tone sandhi in certain structures, a long-standing problem in tone sandhi studies. The paper shows that this resistance to tone sandhi is dependent on both syntactic structures and syntactic categories. In this study, Mandarin tone sandhi domains are related to constituent strength representations, which are direct mappings of syntactic structures. An unspecified order of strong/weak values of constituent strength for a prepositional phrase is proposed. To define a TS domain, several constraints related to metrical factors, constituent strength, the tone sandhi domain grouping direction, and output condition are shown to interact with each other. The optimal tone sandhi domain representation is always the one which violates the lowest-ranked constraints and violates any single constraint to the least degree possible, compared to other representations. The avoidance of tone sandhi by an element, whether it is a preposition or another category, is the result of interactions of the constraints. The variability of surface tone patterns comes from more than one optimal output, from speaking rate or style, and from two possible kinds of competition due to the unspecified constituent strength. © 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers.