Disyllabic foot of Prosodic Words in Chinese - Evidence from Tunxi Hui: 韵律語法中的雙音節標準音步——以屯溪話為例

In his seminal works on prosodic syntax in Chinese, Feng (1996, 2019) proposed that the foot (音步) as a prosodic unit in Chinese requires more than one syllable, the standard foot having two syllables. On the other hand, the monosyllabic foot, referred to as the ‘degenerate foot’ (退化音步), is considered an exception in modern standard Mandarin (Example 1 and 2). Nevertheless, such exceptions are excluded from Tunxi Hui, an under-studied Hui Chinese variety, in which the same syntactic positions need to be fulfilled by a disyllabic foot: namely, the strong form of the first-person singular pronoun in Example 3, and the obligatory presence of a sentence final particle in Example 4. The analysis of Tunxi data is based on original fieldwork and on Lu’s (2018) grammar. We shall argue that evidence from little-known Chinese dialects may provide support for the hypothesis that the disyllabic foot is the basic unit in prosodic syntax not only in Modern Standard Mandarin, but also in a broader range of Chinese/Sinitic languages: indeed, the case of Tunxi shows that the disyllabic constraint may be even stronger than in Mandarin. We shall also discuss the role of syllable weight in shaping this constraint in Tunxi from a comparative perspective.