Patterns of Tone Sandhi Productivity in Tianjin Chinese

Tianjin Chinese has a complex system of tone sandhi. This study provides a detailed acoustic description of tone sandhi patterns in both real lexical items and novel words in Tianjin. The data were collected from 48 speakers of Tianjin, who were instructed to pronounce disyllabic sequences as real words based on voice prompts. The results showed that the productivity of the sandhis in novel words varies depending on the sandhi—some are less productive than in real words and some are more productive than in real words, indicating a combination of underlearning, overlearning, and proper learning of the sandhis from the lexicon. A theoretical model that predicts the productivity patterns based on the phonetic properties of the sandhis and statistical generalizations about the sandhis over the lexicon is also discussed.