The Role of Prosody in Shaping Sinitic Morphology: Two Case Studies

In this paper, we discuss two case studies on how prosody has conditioned the evolution of morphology in Mandarin as well as in other Sinitic languages. After a concise overview of Feng’s (1997, 1998, 2001, 2018, inter alia) application of the principles of Prosodic Morphology to Mandarin, we shall discuss two issues in the diachronic development of Chinese/Sinitic morphology: the creation and development of derivation-like elements; particularly prefixes/prefixoids (Arcodia, 2012, 2023); and phenomena of reduced/nonconcatenative morphology in Northern Chinese dialects (Arcodia, 2013, 2015, 2021; Lamarre, 2015; Lamarre & Ōta, 2017). We shall argue that prefix-like items, despite being generally considered to be morphological constituents, actually seem to follow the prosodic pattern of phrases, i.e. right-to-left footing. We shall also show that grammatical morphemes may undergo strong reduction in a large number of Mandarin and Jin dialects (Arcodia, 2021), and this may lead to cumulative, nonconcatenative exponence, thus constituting a possible counterexample to Feng’s (2018) ‘Morphosyllabic Constraint’. We shall argue that this is made possible by some prosodic characteristics of Northern dialects which are not commonly found e.g. in Southern Sinitic: mostly, the presence of stress and of the neutral tone.