ABSTRACT
The nature of the syntax-phonology interface is of crucial importance to prosodic phonology and it involves two fundamental problems: (i) how accessible is syntactic information to phonological processes; and (ii) what grammatical properties are relevant to phonology? This chapter discusses some interface issues through the case studies of Xiamen and Pingyao, two dialects of Chinese, and tries to prove that Optimality Theory (OT) fails to capture the nature of tone sandhi in the cases of both Xiamen and Pingyao by brutal force or ad-hoc constraints, and that interface theory within the OT framework does not have explanatory power superior to that of the theory proposed before the OT era.
