Fission Reduplication in Modern Chinese Dialects

There is a common phenomenon in Chinese, for Old Chinese down through modern dialects, in which a monosyllabic word phonologically and semantically corresponds to a disyllabic word. The present paper aims at investigating and analyzing the same phenomenon in modern Chinese dialects. There are three objectives in this paper: the first is to analyze the data collected from modern Chinese dialects to explore the nature of this phenomenon; the second is to develop a generative theory of morpho-phonological interaction to account for the formation of this reduplication pattern, and the third is to make a comparison across modern dialects with respect to the form alternation