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Non-contrastive features and categorical patterning in Chinese diminutive suffixation: Max[F] or Ident[F]?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2002

Jie Zhang
Jie Zhang
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Abstract

The influence of non-contrastive phonetic details such as intergestural timing, stop release burst and articulatory effort expense on phonological patterning has been discussed extensively in Browman & Goldstein (1992), Flemming (1995), Jun (1995), Kirchner (1997), Silverman (1997), Boersma (1998), Gordon (1999), Hayes (1999), Steriade (1999, 2000), Zhang (forthcoming), among others. Even though the way in which phonology incorporates phonetic factors is debatable (see Hayes & Steriade, forthcoming for an overview of the debate and § 3.1.1 for more detailed discussion), the fact that there exist phonological patterns that are governed by phonetic factors seems less so. In this paper, without committing myself to any view of how phonetic factors are encoded in phonology, I present the case of Chinese retroflex suffixation in support of the relevance of non-contrastive phonetic features to categorical phonological patterning. In addition, I argue that MAXFEATURE constraints (Lombardi 1995, 1998, Casali 1996, Pulleyblank 1996, Causley 1997, Walker 1999; henceforth Max[F]) are needed to account for the data in question.

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonology , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , December 2000 , pp. 427 - 478
Copyright
© 2000 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Donca Steriade, Bruce Hayes, Yen-Hwei Lin, an associate editor of Phonology and two anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments on earlier versions of this paper. I also thank Adam Albright and Marco Baroni for their help in running the EMA experiment. Finally, thanks are due to audiences at NELS 29, the joint meeting of 10th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics and 7th Conference of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics, 4th Seoul International Conference on Linguistics, and ‘On the formal way to Chinese linguistics’, where various aspects of this work were presented. All remaining errors are my own responsibility.