An analysis of AABB reduplicated plurals in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

This thesis provides an analysis of Mandarin Chinese plural AABB words. Plural meaning is observed in AABB nouns, verbs and adjectives. For plural AABB nouns and adjectives, this plural meaning is a greater plural, which indicates a vague cardinality of a large number of entities and cannot be quantized exactly. Although not all AABB verbs display pluractionality with equivalent properties, most AABB verbs are associated with a sense of plurality. The theoretical assumption is made that a reduplicative morpheme is responsible for the pairing between the AABB surface form and plural semantics in these words. Under this assumption, the internal syntactic representation as well as the phonological realization of these words are investigated. The syntactic representation of AABB words combines the base of reduplication and the reduplicative morpheme. Adopting a Distributed Morphology framework, the base for reduplication is argued to be a symmetric headless merge of two roots. The base for reduplication requires an internal structure, because not all plural AABB words have an AB counterpart and there are no AABB words based on a monomorphemic AB base. The relation between the constituents is headless and symmetric. The reasons for this are that the semantics of the AABB words do not indicate an obvious head and that some AABB plurals are also attested in reversed BBAA order. The constituents are roots, as the base constituents are void of syntactic and semantic category features and sometimes give rise to idiomatic AABB words. A root status is also ascribed to the reduplicative morpheme. This analysis of the reduplicative morpheme captures its categorial flexibility, semantic denotation and derivational nature. As for the phonological account of AABB plurals, a parallel can be drawn to AABB reduplicated adjectives that express a degree, as these also involve a symmetric merge structure as the base for reduplication. This structure compels double exponence of the reduplicative morpheme, resulting in a reduplicative morpheme to suffix to each base constituent. Total reduplication accounts for the exact match in segmental material of the bases and reduplicants, but does not explain the tonal peculiarities of these AABB words. Within an Optimality Theoretic framework, a constraint ranking is developed to account for tone neutralization of the second syllable and the obligatory presence of an underlying or high tone on the BB syllables. This constraint ranking reflects the idea that metrical structure has an impact on tone realization.