A distributed morphology account of tonal change in Middle Chinese

Tonal Change (biàndiào: 變調) is traditionally taken as the result of *-s suffix insertion in Old Chinese, which is syntactically motivated by operations such as causative alternation or defining a syntactic category. This paper scrutinizes causative alternations in Zuo Tradition, finding that (1) there are cases undergoing Tonal Change when certain syntactic operations take place, while there are also cases of Tonal Change that do not undergo any syntactic operation; and (2) the same Tonal Change is witnessed by different syntactico-semantic operations. This paper adopts the Distributed Morphology framework and proposes two different realizations for the syntactic operations of causative alternation and grammatical category specification and change in Old Chinese, namely insertion of the suffix *-s and null Ø. *-s and Ø are phonological exponents of the Abstract Morphemes v_CAUSE and v_CAT, two distinct f-morphs with the same phonological realizations. The latter is a category-defining f-morph which selects a Root and assigns a certain syntactic category to its complement, whereas the former is a causative f-morph that combines with a vP and introduces an external causer argument. This paper attributes the fact that the same phonological exponents are adopted by different syntactic operations to separationism, which both allows morphological syncretism, so that similar syntactico-semantic forms can be realized in different ways phonologically, and permits polyfunctionality of phonological expressions.