X-slots, feature trees, and the Chinese sound inventory: a twenty-first century take on Mandarin phonological structure.

• Author: Li, Chris Wen-Chao
• Position: The Phonology of Standard Chinese - Book Review

THE PHONOLOGY OF Standard Chinese, or "Mandarin phonology," as it is sometimes referred to, is a field in which consensus has been exceedingly hard to come by. A glance at the twenty or so books, theses, and journal articles published on the subject in the past twenty-five years in North America alone will show that experts are divided on such basic issues as the number of vowel heights, the phonemic membership of consonantal series, the constituent structure of the syllable, and the exact nature of diminutive suffixation. Faced with such a state of affairs, the author charged with the task of providing a definitive account for the general linguist confronts a number of choices: (1) provide a literature review surveying the various approaches and their respective strengths and weaknesses, concluding with the observation that there is no current consensus; (2) use the most widely accepted model and discuss criticisms it has received and revisions it has undergone in past years; (3) formulate one's own theory based on the information available. San Duanmu's Phonology of Standard Chinese is an example of the third approach. In this respect, the author does considerably better than any number of recent theses on the subject over the past decade because of his broader range, which encompasses both segmental and non-segmental aspects, so as to provide as complete an account as possible of the language, rather than narrowly focus on a specific issue. This spreading out of resources, however, has meant that some chapters are stronger than others: Duanmu is at his best discussing tone, stress, domain and related suprasegmental phenomena, and is less proficient in providing phonetic description, typological affiliations, and historical and sociolinguistic background, which is not a big fault considering the focus of the book is theoretical phonology. In addition, Duanmu is a master of simplification, and this can cut both ways: one may praise him for his genius in making technical material accessible to the general public , or fault him with oversimplifying linguistic concepts and presenting one-sided debates on controversial phonological issues. All in all, this is a book that tackles a divided subject, and attempts to be contemporary in its approach and comprehensive in its coverage. Despite mixed results from its efforts, there is no other book currently on the market that sets Mandarin phonology in a post-SPE theoretical framework, and for this reason alone, the work is a must for the bookshelf of any linguist interested in the sound system of Modern Chinese in light of modern phonological theory.

The book is divided into twelve chapters, beginning with an overview of the socio-historical setting of the Chinese language and available literature on the subject. The second chapter then gives phonetic descriptions that serve as input for discussions of allophonic variation, co-occurrence constraints, and syllable structure that are interspersed through chapters 2, 3, and 4--chapters that contain some of the book's most original insights. After dealing with segmental phonology, the logical next step would be to proceed to suprasegmentals, but to do so requires definition of Chinese wordhood for use as a domain in metrical phonology, so chapter 5 is devoted to exactly that. Chapter 6 follows with a brilliant thesis on Chinese stress, and chapters 7 and 8 showcase via morphology the power of the Chinese stress model built in chapter 6. The model, together with the author's formulation of syllable structure in chapter 4, is used to tackle diminutive [r] suffixation in chapter 9, and the representation of Standard Chinese tone in chapter 10. The results of chapter 10 are used to carve out the domain of Mandarin Tone 3 sandhi in chapter 11. Corpus-related phenomena not cove red in the previous chapters are discussed in chapter 12.

The opening chapter is arguably Duanmu's weakest, a fact that should not deter the reader from proceeding, as the author's strengths lie not in historical linguistics or sociolinguistics, but rather in the areas of tone, stress, syllable structure, and morphology from chapter 2 onwards, subjects that formed the bulk of his doctoral dissertation and his publications over the past decade.

The second chapter is a discussion of the "sounds" of Standard Chinese, providing raw data for analyses in later chapters. By "sound' Duanmu refers to roughly segment-sized units--the ambiguity in terminology is deliberate--so as to allow the term to encompass units of different traditions and at different levels of analysis. After introducing the fundamentals of phonemic analysis, the author points out that phonemic economy, often the sole argument given in Chinese phonological analyses, is a concept frequently misused. In traditional analyses, phonemic economy amounts to little more than counting the number of posited underlying segments, but Duanmu believes that features and possible combinations of features and segments are no less important. This argument is used to support the position that positing complex onsets [C.sup.i], [C.sup.w], [C.sup.y] in Standard Chinese is no less economical than positing only simple onsets of the form C, which are then combined with independent onglides [j], [w] and [y]. He then goes on to discuss features and gives the articulator-based feature geometry used for his analysis of Standard Chinese, reproduced in Fig. 1.

Most notably, in accord with his 1994 findings, he rejects the notion of contour segments, and chooses instead to represent affricates as [+stri, -cont] strident stops. He illustrates also how underspecification can account for the variable [front] and [round] values of the Chinese mid vowels [e], [y] and [o], and touches briefly upon vowel length and diphthongs, but leaves technical specifications to chapter 4.

A description of the Standard Chinese segment inventory is then given, one that differs from traditional accounts in a number of details. Duanmu treats initial [r] as an approximant rather than a fricative, pointing out that there are no other voiced fricatives in the Mandarin consonantal inventory, and that the sound has little actual friction (Fu 1956; Wang 1979). He also points out that the codas [n] and [rj] often have incomplete closure (Wang 1993), that [x] is sometimes [h], and that voiceless unaspirated initials are often voiced in weak syllables. The alveolar series, following Chinese tradition, is labeled "dental," as palatographic studies (Zhou and Wu 1963) suggest that the tongue tip is on the teeth. Duanmu opts to treat possible CG combinations here rather than in the following chapter on phonotactics because the analysis contains tools needed for the featural description of the alveopalatal initials. The alveopalatals occur in complementary distribution with the dentals, the retroflexes, and th e velars, and a central issue in Chinese phonology has been to decide whether the alveopalatals should stand alone or be treated as allophones of one of the other consonantal series (Li 1999). Duanmu opts for representing the alveopalatals as derivatives of the dentals, citing phonetic similarity and the association of the two series in "feminine speech" in Beijing (Cao 1987), but ignoring counterevidence from Mandarin dialects which favors grouping of the series with the velars.

The next sections deal with vowels. Duanmu adopts an uncontroversial 3-height/5-vowel model for Standard Chinese. Especially commendable is his discussion of variation in the manifestation of the mid and low vowels, providing a thorough review of key Chinese studies on the subject previously unavailable to English readers, and in the process disambiguating symbols such as [A] and [E] unique to the Chinese tradition. He chooses to view the apical vowels [Z] and [r] as separate phonemes arising from consonantal prolongation, and treats the zero onset as underlyingly empty but filled by [?], [rj], [y] or [h] through an obligatory onset constraint at the syllable level.

Which brings us to his discussion of levels of analysis. Duanmu uses three levels of analysis in his treatment of Standard Chinese: underlying, syllabic, and...