ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 investigates the role of the prosodic word in the Fuzhou dialect and the application of various Fuzhou phonological rules (TS, MTS, FC, and CL) at the lexical level. Based on the survey of major types of morphosyntactic words in the Fuzhou dialect, I examine the application of TS, MTS, FC, and CL within the domain formed by Fuzhou morphosyntactic words and show that it is the morphosyntactic words that form the domain of lexical-level application for these rules in this dialect. Since the domain formed by Fuzhou morphosyntactic words is of the same size as the terminal node of the syntactic tree and theoretically contains an unlimited number of syllables, I argue that it corresponds to the prosodic word, rather than other prosodic constituents, in the prosodic hierarchy. Moreover, not only is the prosodic word domain constructed on the basis of morphological information, but the degree of lexical-level application of TS, MTS, FC, and CL within the prosodic word domain is also conditioned by the types of morphological processes, which serves as a typical example for the interactions between phonology and morphology.
