ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 discusses the phonological phrase in the Fuzhou dialect. Beginning with the long-standing issue of the phrasal-level application of TS, this chapter examines how TS, FC, and CL operate at the phrasal level and shows that it is the phonological phrase that serves as the phrasal-level domain of application for these three rules. In this chapter, I propose a three-step definition of the phonological phrase in Fuzhou, which combines both the EBA and the RBA, and allows the Exhaustivity constraint entailed in the SLH to be violated. It is demonstrated that this alternative approach covers more linguistic facts and offers greater predictive power as compared to previous studies and any analyses solely based on the EBA or the RBA. I also introduce the Domain Impenetrability Condition (DIC) into the analysis of the phrasal-level application of TS, FC, and CL, which successfully accounts for the “no look-back” phenomena in the phonological phrase in Fuzhou. Moreover, it is shown that TS, FC, and CL exhibit different degrees of application within the phonological phrase domain—the application of TS and FC is obligatory within all phonological phrases (restricted only by the DIC), while CL only applies in phonological phrases constructed without φ-restructuring.
