A Fresh Look at Putonghua Onset-rime Pairs

0. In this article I would like to present a revised analysis of Putonghua onset-rime pairs. I will present a revised set of Putonghua onsets and rimes. These will be contrasted with some current assumptions about the content of each set. It will be observed that the set of onsets will be increased slightly whilst the number of Putonghua rimes will be significantly reduced. This analysis will be done within the framework of Government Phonology (GP). This current work owes a great debt to the pioneering research of Goh Yeng-seng. He provided the first treatment of Beijing Mandarin segmental phonology within the GP framework Goh (1997). Further significant research on a variety of Han languages is going on at GDUFS and has lead to a greater understanding of the phonology of Han languages in general. I have attempted to apply these recent findings to this reanalysis of Putonghua. I will begin with a brief summary of some theoretical points of GP to allow the reader not familiar with this framework to better follow the reanalysis.