Circular tonal chain shifts in Jiaoxian compound words

Abstract

This study examines the tonal chain shifts in pre-neutral toned syllables of Jiaoxian compound words, using the framework of Optimality Theory. The tonal chain shifts are motivated by reducing articulatory effort according to the tonal markedness scale. When a tone shifts to a more marked one, it is because of the anti-neutralization nature, which can be captured by Preserving Contrasts (PC). PC keeps feature contrast in the output. The maintenance of PC comes from transderivational anti-faithfulness, and the output-to-output anti-faithfulness constraints evaluate a pair of related words and require dissimilarity between them. © The Author(s) 2015.