Base-driven Stratification In The Lexicon

This thesis is a Lexicalist study on the interplay between morphology and phonology,as well as the interplay between morphology and semantics in the Jinese dialects of Chinese.Based on evidences from the Jinese dialects,this thesis argues for a Base-driven Stratification Model in the lexicon and formulates the properties of each lexical stratum in the lexicon of Jinese dialects.The theory of Lexical Phonology has two different hypotheses concerning the stratification in the lexicon,the Affix-driven Stratification Hypothesis and the Base-driven Stratification Hypothesis.The interaction between morphology and phonology in Mandarin Chinese has been analyzed within the Affix-driven Stratification Model,however,these previous studies failed to reach an agreement on the exact stratification within the lexicon of Mandarin.In view of this,this thesis turns to the Chinese dialects for evidences to shed light on the interaction between morphology and phonology-semantics in Chinese languages.As for the research object in this thesis,with a good variety of means to create new words and a close interplay between morphology and phonology,Jinese dialects provide important data for Generative linguistics to gain an insight into the derivation of words in Chinese languages.The three dialects studied in this thesis have both concatenative morphology and nonconcatenative morphology and exhibit a close interplay between morphology and phonology.Panshang dialect employs the special mechanisms of rime change and tone change to form new words.This dialect has two tone sandhi rules concerning Shangsheng,one phonologically conditioned and the other morphologically conditioned.The morphological processes in Pingyao dialect can be classified into two kinds depending on the tone sandhi pattern adopted.In Shenmu dialect,morphemes bearing the neutral tone show tonal alternations due to the phonotactic constrain *LL and whether the second syllable in disyllabic words is unstressed is constrained by the relative prominence of different tones.In the theoretical aspect,we revise Giegerich(1999)'s model by incorporating phase derivation into each lexical stratum and abandoning the Root-to-Word Conversion in the original model.The Base-driven Stratification model has the Lexicalist Hypothesis as its theoretical prerequisite,while the Word-internal Phase Theory proposed by anti-Lexicalism Distributed Morphology claims that morphological structures and syntactic structures are isomorphic and are built by the same syntactic operations.However,the two theories are in no contradiction with each other in acknowledging that morphophonology and morpho-semantics are distinct from sentence phonology and sentence semantics.In this respect,the Word-internal Phase Theory is a return to Lexicalism.In our analysis,the revised Base-driven Stratification model demonstrates its validity in explaining the distinct phonological performances and semantic properties of words formed on different lexical stratum.In our analysis,different from standard Lexical Phonology's focus on the phonological performance of affixes,we give equal weight to a word's phonological properties and semantic properties.Word formation processes in the three dialects are examined from the following aspects:A.the semantic compositionality of derived wordsB.the phonological performances of derived wordsC.the productivity of word formation rulesOur findings support the Base-driven Stratification Hypothesis proposed by Giegerich(1999),as well as the distinction between Inner Morphology and Outer Morphology suggested by Word-internal Phase Theory.The supporting evidences are as follows.First,in the three dialects,according to the semantic and phonological properties of the derived words,two groups of morphological processes can be distinguished.The first group produces words with opaque semantics and phonology and takes both bound roots and words as base;moreover,most morphological processes are comparatively less productive.The second group shows high productivity,produces words with transparent semantics and phonology and only has words as base.The distinction between the two groups of morphological processes confirms the predictions made by the Base-driven Stratification model and the Word-internal Phase Theory.Second,the most convincing evidence comes from those affixes with dual membership,which prove the validity of defining each lexical stratum by the category of base rather than the affix.Since the same affix can be added both to a root base and a word base,the words derived naturally demonstrate different phonological and semantic properties.The lexical stratification model we propose for Jinese dialects is as follows:In the three dialects,according to the categories of the base,word formation processes take place on two strata in the lexicon,the root stratum and the word stratum.On the root stratum,the first phase in word derivation is formed.Affixation processes combine the uncategorized root with the category-assigning affixes,and compounding processes first combine two or more uncategorized roots to form a compound root,and then the compound root is merged with a category-assigning morpheme.Words formed on this stratum show the possibility of noncompositional meaning and less transparent phonological structure.On the word stratum,the base in word formation is morpho-syntactically categorized word with definite semantic features,thus the derived words can be semantically decomposed into the base and the affix and are phonologically transparent.The theoretical significance of this research lies in the following aspects:Firstly,this research studies the interface between morphology and phonology-semantics based on the word formation processes in Chinese dialects and demonstrates the theoretical significance of Chinese dialects in testing the hypotheses proposed by Generative linguistics concerning the interplay between morphology and phonology-semantics.Secondly,within the lexical stratification model formulated in this thesis,variations among the three dialects concerning the interplay between morphology and phonology-semantics,as well as the stratum affiliation of certain word formation processes common to the three dialects,can have a clear reflection.In the future research,this lexical stratification model needs to be further testified by word formation processes in other Chinese dialects.