Neutralization of T 3 and T 5 Sandhi in Suzhou Chinese

This paper examines the two sandhi patterns of disyllabic compound whose initial tone is either a high falling tone (T3) or a dipping tone (T5) in Suzhou in the framework of Optimality Theory. The idea of different levels of tone melody in (Shih, 1986) is adopted in this paper. Namely, the syllable level tone melody changes to word level which lead to the neutralization of T3 and T5 sandhi. Left-headed metrical structure, foot formation and stress assignment are the main factors for the positional tone retention and deletion, while tone-syllable association and tonal sonority hierarchy help to evaluate the optimal output of the tone sandhi pattern ([HL.L] or [H.L]). The two sandhi patterns are argued to be outputs of different constraint ranking instead of syllable weight change.