Foot-shift and disyllabification in the history of Chinese

Abstract

This paper argues that the Chinese language has undergone a foot-shift from the Old Chinese monosyllabic foot to a Modern Chinese disyllabic foot. It will be shown that the natural simplification of Old Chinese syllables has caused the foot-shift, resulting in disyllabification. The disappearance of bimoraic feet in Old Chinese has resulted from the loss of consonantal codas, including codas of consonant clusters, which has led to the disappearance of heavy syllables, as well as super-heavy syllables. In other words, this foot-shift can be explained as a compensatory transformation of a heavy Old Chinese dimoraic monosyllable to a pair of light monomoraic disyllables. One way of understanding this evolution is that disyllabification of feet in Modern Chinese is a compensatory mechanism to maintain foot complexity.