INFIXING WITH A VENGEANCE: PINGDING MANDARIN INFIXATION* 2. -INFIXATION IN PINGDING MANDARIN Pingding Mandarin is a dialect of Mandarin Chinese spoken in the Shanxi province of China. Like most Mandarin dialects, Pingding

the nucleus marks diminutive. Pingding infixation not only creates onset clusters but also introduces a phoneme. Both features are otherwise not found elsewhere in the language. We argue that the infix -, which is cognate with the diminutive -r suffix in other Mandarin dialects, is the result of rhotic metathesis (cf. Blevins and Garrett (1998)). This study shows that Pingding infixation presents an interesting challenge to the theory that claims sound change/metathesis is perceptually optimizing and that it is goal-driven (Hume (1997, 1998, 2001), Steriade (2001)). In this paper, we advance a theory of the origin of Pingding infixation, based on the listener-oriented (i.e., ‘innocent’) view of sound change (Ohala (1993)), which accounts for the appearance of as an excrescent segment through acoustic means, rather than articulatory (Chen (1992)) or phonotactic ones (Lin (2002)).