Previous studies of tone sandhi in Mandarin dialects have attributed tone sandhi motivations to phonotactics or allomorph listing due to the lack of phonetic or phonological grounding. They also observed that domains of sandhi rules within a dialect are either sensitive or non-sensitive to morphosyntactic configurations. In addition, the traditional parallelist framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993 2004) usually suffices in previous analyses of opaque sandhi patterns. This study presents the trisyllabic tone sandhi patterns of Laoling, a Northern Mandarin dialect. In contrast to past research, we show that (a) the tone sandhi rules are phonetically and phonologically motivated, (b) the sandhi rules can differ in structure-sensitivity, and (c) there are opaque sandhi patterns that challenge the parallelist OT framework. We propose a serialist analysis under Harmonic Serialism (McCarthy 2010).
Chen et al. (Sun,) studied this question.