The productivity of variable disyllabic tone sandhi in Tianjin Chinese

Tianjin Chinese has one of the more complex tone sandhi systems in Northern Chinese dialects. Due to its close contact with Standard Chinese, many of its tone sandhi patterns are also variable. This article first reports a detailed acoustic study 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 varied depending on the sandhi—some were less productive than in real words, and some were more productive, 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 then proposed.