Phonotactics of Gender in Mandarin Given Names: Patterns and Constraints

In this paper, we investigate the phonotactic patterns that correlate with gender in given names for Mandarin Chinese, a language that is phonotactically quite different from English. We find that many of the phonological predictors for gender in English trend in the same direction for Mandarin. We also compare the phonotactic grammars of Mandarin female and male given names obtained from Maximum-Entropy phonotactic learning models, and find that certain low acoustic frequency sounds that imply largeness according to the Frequency-Code Hypothesis are penalized for female names, while higher acoustic frequency sounds that imply smallness according to the Frequency-Code Hypothesis are not marked in the grammar for male names