Infixing with a Vengeance: Pingding Mandarin Infixation

Author: Yu A.C.L.

Source: Journal of East Asian Linguistics, Volume 13, Number 1, January 2004 , pp. 39-58(20)

Publisher: Springer

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Abstract:

In the Pingding dialect of Mandarin, the infixing of a retroflex lateral, -l-, before the nucleus marks diminutive. Pingding infixation not only creates onset clusters but also introduces a phoneme. Both features are otherwise not found elsewhere in the language. We argue that the infix -l-, which is cognate with the diminutive -r suffix in other Mandarin dialects, is the result of rhotic metathesis (cf. Blevins and Garrett (1998)). This study shows that Pingding infixation presents an interesting challenge to the theory that claims sound change/metathesis is perceptually optimizing and that it is goal-driven (Hume (1997, 1998, 2001), Steriade (2001)). In this paper, we advance a theory of the origin of Pingding infixation, based on the listener-oriented (i.e., `innocent') view of sound change (Ohala (1993)), which accounts for the appearance of -l- as an excrescent segment through acoustic means, rather than articulatory (Chen (1992)) or phonotactic ones (Lin (2002)).

Document Type: Research article

Affiliations: 1: Department of Linguistics, 1010E 59th Street, University of Chicago, Chicago IL 60637, USA, Email: aclyu@socrates.berkeley.edu

Publication date: 2004-01-01