An analysis of the rime harmony and tone circle phenomena in Chenghai Teochew

Project title: An analysis of the rime harmony and tone circle phenomena in Chenghai Teochew

• Teochew, also known as Chaozhouhua or Chiuchow, is a Sino-Tibetan language. According to the classification by Thurgo (2003), Teochew belongs to the Min language group. In general, it is spoken by people from Chaoshan areas at the east of Guangdong province in China, and it is also widely used by people from Southeast Asian countries including Singapore, Thai, Malaysia, and so on. Moreover, within Chaoshan regions, Teochew has several varieties among different cities (e.g., Jieyang Teochew); some varieties were explored in linguistic fieldwork (e.g., Yeo, 2011; Peng, 2012) and this paper examines a relatively understudied variety, Chenghai Teochew.

• This paper attempts to analyze two phonological phenomena in Chenghai Teochew. The first phenomenon is the agreement of vowel features between the V1 and V2 in the rime. For instance, when V1 (i.e., /i/) and V2 are different in backness, the V2 in Chenghai Teochew will need to agree with /i/ on being [-back]. When V1 is /u/ and V2 is [+low], Chenghai Teochew will need the V2 to agree with /u/ on being [-low]. This harmony agreement between the vowels can be explained by the spreading of backness and height feature progressively from V1 to V2. It is possible that there are certain phonotactic constraints that the two vowels should not have opposite values. However, the constraint is too strong and may make wrong predictions.The second phenomenon is the complex tone sandhi system in Chenghai Teochew. Similar to other Min languages, we identified a tone sandhi circle 53->35->213->53. This tone circle phenomena have been explored using different approaches. This paper compares two main ideas: one approach is the extended OT with several constraints. However, this approach would need several constraints and lack cross-linguistic generalizability. The other approach reviewed is the register harmony, which strategically employs the Asianist tone model and focuses on the spreading of pitch height (register) from the trigger tones to the sandhi tones. Most tone sandhi within the tone circle can be accounted for by register harmony, yet not the whole circle is not explained fully, and several explanations were given in this paper.