Prosodic Morphology in Mandarin Chinese It is not entirely clear if Modern Chinese is a monosyllabic or disyllabic language. Although a disyllabic prosodic unit of some sort has long been considered by many to be at play in Chinese grammar, the intuition is not always rigidly fleshed out theoretically in the area of Chinese morphology. In this book, Shengli Feng applies the theoretical model of prosodic morphology to Chinese morphology to provide the theoretical clarity regarding how and why Mandarin Chinese words are structured in a particular way. All of the facts generated by the system of prosodic morphology in Chinese provide new perspectives for linguistic theory, as well as insights for teaching Chinese and studying of Chinese poetic prosody. Shengli Feng is Professor of Chinese Linguistics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Director of the CUHK-BLCU Joint Research Center for Chinese Linguistics and Applied Linguistics and Yangtze Scholar Chair Professor at the Beijing Language and Culture University. Prosodic Morphology in Mandarin Chinese Shengli Feng First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Shengli Feng The right of Shengli Feng to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. 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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-22835-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-39278-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Prosodic word as an origin of compounds in Classical Chinese 14 3 Monosyllabicity and disyllabicity 68 4 Prosodically constrained compound formation 90 5 Minimal and maximal word effects 115 6 Prosodic register grammar 136 7 Compound prosodic word – Sizige 四字格 164 8 Conclusion and final remarks 185 Index 192 1 Introduction This book studies prosodic morphology in Chinese. Prosodic morphology concerns the shapes and sizes of canonical words, affixation as well as word formation in a language. Although being a new area in general linguistics and especially in Chinese linguistics, many prosodic mor- phological phenomena have been recognized over the past half-century. The early Republican philologist Huang (1932/1983:99) 黃侃 first pointed out the following fact:1 In Chinese, the sound (refers to morpheme, by Feng) is monosyllabic while the tone (refers to prosodic unit, by Feng) is disyllabic, and thus monosyllabic words often become disyllabic ones, giving rise to the fact of one meaning with two words: one is a monosyllabic while the other is disyllabic, such as tia-n 天 ‘sky’ and huángtia-n皇天 ‘sky’ or hàotia-n 昊天 ‘sky’. The disyllabic words are redundant in plain speech (zhìyán質言), but useful in literary language. Because of the properties given above, Chinese poems and parallel proses are created accordingly. Other types of versifica- tion of the language are also formed by these two features. In Chinese, the morphemes are monosyllabic while the rhythmic units are disyllabic. It is also recognized that monosyllabic words often become disyllabic ones in literary texts, as pointed out by Huang (1932/1983). In the late 1930s, Guo 郭紹虞 (1938) also pointed out the syllabic flexibility of Chinese vocabu- laries in terms of elasticity (elastic words 彈性詞), and in the early 1960s, Lü (1963) recognized the morphosyntactic preferences between [2+1] and [1+2] syllabic patterns (namely, forms with [σσ+σ] and [σ+σσ] syllable structure) in Modern Chinese. For example: 1. a. 鞋店 鞋帽店 *鞋商店 鞋帽商店 - - xié diàn xié mào diàn *xié shangdiàn xié mào shangdiàn shoes shop shoes hat shop shoes shop shoes hat shop ‘shoes shop’ ‘shoes & hat shop’ ‘shoes shop’ ‘shoes & hat shop’ 2 Introduction b.種樹 *種植樹 種果樹 種植樹木 zhòng shù *zhòngzhí shù zhòng guoˇshù zhòngzhí shùmù plant tree plant tree plant fruit tree plant tree ‘to plant trees’ ‘to plant trees’ ‘to plant fruit trees’ ‘to plant trees’ The most recent and important works on prosodic morphology were initi- ated by Lu and Duanmu in 1991 and Feng in 1995. The former proposed a stress theory which successfully captured the difference between the [2+1] (nominal) and [1+2] (verbal) patterns in Chinese grammar, while the latter introduced the theory of prosodic morphology (McCarthy and Prince 1993) into Chinese linguistics and developed a subsystem of Chinese prosodic morphology. This book is mainly based on the newly developed theory of prosodic mor- phology in Chinese and argues that the crucial point in prosodic morphology, as defined by McCarthy and Prince (1993:79–153), is as follows: “The right/left edge of some grammatical constituent coincides with the correspond- ing edge of some phonological constituents.” As we will see in the following chapters, the sizes of Chinese morphological categories, namely, morphemes and words, would coincide with the prosodic categories of mora and foot respectively in the language (Feng 1995, 2009). According to the theory of Alignment: [M] = [σ] (namely, a morpheme coin- cides with a syllable), the notion of morphosyllabicity, first coined and defined by DeFrancis (1986), is formulated as a prosodic constraint in the following: 2. Morphosyllabic Constraint (MC) [M] = [σ] ALIGN: M-Edge, σ-Edge = Left, Right In (2), “M” stands for morpheme and “σ” for syllable. The operation system of ALIGN (alignment) requires the left and right edges of a morpheme to be coincided with the left and right edges of a syllable respectively. Given the Mor- phosyllabic Constraint in (2), this book demonstrates that a syllable in Mod- ern Chinese corresponds to a morpheme, which demands that the indigenous morphemes in Chinese are monosyllabic. The MC in (2) successfully captures the essential characteristics of the Chinese languages among the Sino-Tibetan family as what Li 李方桂 (1973:2) has pointed out: One of the characteristics of this family (Sino-Tibetan) is the tendency toward Mon- osyllabism. By Monosyllabism we do not mean that all the words in these languages consist of single syllables, but that a single syllable is an important phonological unit and often is a morphemic unit, the structure of which is rigidly determined by the Introduction 3 phonological rules of the language, and serves as the basis for the formation of words, phrases, and sentences. The correctness of the prediction by (2) is also evidenced by the statistics shown in Shen (2007). Briefly, there is a total of 41,915 words in the Fifth Edi- tion of Xiàndài Hànyuˇ Cídiaˇn 現代漢語詞典 Modern Chinese Dictionary (2005), but only 849 (3%) of these words are polysyllabic, which are arguably all non- indigenous in nature in the sense that they are either loan words from other languages, or words passed down from Classical Chinese thousands of years ago. Despite the complexity of the origins of polysyllabic words, they are neither indigenous morphemes, nor root morphemes in the morphology of Mandarin Chinese (see Sproat and Shih 1996, Feng 2009). Phonologically, a well-known phenomenon in Chinese is the fact that there is no resyllabification process in the language. For example, the process of CVC|VC → *(CV (CVC) lín-a-n 林庵 → *lí-nán 黎楠 is not allowed. The lack of a resyl- labicification process in Chinese phonology is arguably a consequence of the Morphosyllabic Constraint, that is, the morpheme-final consonant or vowel must occupy the final position in the corresponding syllable, and the morpheme- initial consonant or vowel must occupy the initial position in that syllable. Con- sequently, a “morpheme mid-syllable/consonant” will not de-align a morpheme (see McCarthy and Prince 1993:38). This may be the reason why there is no such ‘de-alignment’ operation (resyllabification) in Mandarin Chinese. As we will see in Chapter 3, the Morphosyllabic Constraint in (2) also leads to a phonological reduction when lexical morphemes become functional ones. Kratochvil (1977) has observed: “under some conditions it (i.e., “the leftward movement of stress” in a disyllabic word – Feng, 1995:107) causes atonicity, reduction in the segmental structure, and ultimately the loss of syllable status of B altogether, and the fusion of B with A (in an [A+B] construction)” and thus, “Modern Peking Dialect shows signs of a process involving syllable fusion as its ultimate result” (Kratochvil 1977:26–27). Note that this process exclusively happens to functional elements and no root morphemes have undergone a phonological reduction in the language. This shows a great possibility that the phonological reduction of the second syllable in disyllabic words may be a result of the Morphosyllabic Constraint. That is, all root morphemes follow the MC in (2) and only (semi-)functional elements (root morphemes that have lost their lexical meaning in a disyllabic form) are exceptional. For example, 3. Monosyllabic Word Disyllabic Word Monosyllabic Word 600 AD 11th century AD Mandarin Chinese 孩 孩-兒 孩兒 hái hái-ér háir Hái-ér 孩兒 ‘child-son’ is a disyllabic word formed by hái 孩 ‘child’ plus a monomorphemic nominal suffix -ér 兒 which etymologically means ‘son’ or ‘child’ in Classical Chinese and begins to be used as a diminutive suffix around