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<Paper uid="W97-1101">
  <Title>New Zealand</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Data
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The data we use to illustrate our ideas are two phonological histories taken from the field of Chinese linguistics. One is an account of the Modern Beijing (MB) dialect from an earlier stage of Chinese, referred to as Middle Chinese, and published as Chen (1976); the other is an account of the Modern Cantonese (MC) dialect also from Middle Chinese, published as Chen and Newman (1984a, 1984b and 1985). These should be consulted for further explanation of the diachronic rules and their relative chronology as well as for an explanation of the rule labels used in this paper. For brevity, we will refer to the former as Chen76 and the latter as CN84 in subsequent sections. We would now like to draw attention now to five features of these accounts which make them ideal for the purpose at hand:  positions. Each account assumes Middle Chinese reconstructions which are phonetically explicit, states each rule in a formal style, and defines the ordering relationships which hold between the rules. This degree of comprehensiveness and explicitness in writing the history of a language is relatively rare. It is even rarer to have accounts of two related dialects described in a similarly explicit way. Obviously, when it comes to translating historical accounts into phonological derivations, the more explicit the original account, the more readily one can arrive at the derivations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> 2. The two accounts assume identical reconstructions for the Middle Chinese forms, which of course is crucial in any meaningful comparison of the two dialects. Not surprisingly, given the existence of Sinology as an established field and one with a history going back well over a hundred years, there are many conflicting proposals about Middle Chinese and its pronunciation. Decisions about the forms of Middle Chinese go hand in hand, necessarily, with corresponding decisions about the historical rules which lead from those forms to modern-day reflexes. One can not easily compare competing historical accounts if they assume different reconstructed forms as their starting points. See Chen76 for a full description and justification of the Middle Chinese reconstructions used in these accounts.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> 3. The two accounts are couched in terms of one phonological framework. This, too, is a highly desirable feature when it comes to making comparisons between the sets of rules involved in each account. The framework could be described as a somehwat &amp;quot;relaxed&amp;quot; version of SPE (Chomsky and Halle, 1968). For example, the accounts make use of orthodox SPE features alongside others where it was thought appropriate (e.g. \[+/-labial\], \[+/- acute\]). Phonotactic conditions are utilized as a way of triggering certain phonological changes, alongside more conventional rule statements.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> 4. The accounts purport to describe the phonological histories of a single database of Chinese characters and their readings in modern dialects (Zihui, 1962). This is a substantial database containing about 2,700 Chinese characters and it is the readings of these characters in two of the dialects -- Modern Beijing and Modern Cantonese dialects which are the outputs of the rule derivations in the two accounts.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> 5. The accounts themselves are published in an easily available journal, The Journal o\] Chinese Linguistics, which allows readers to scrutinize the original discussion and rule statements.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The features alluded to in points 1-5 make these two accounts uniquely suited to testing out formal hypotheses relating to historical phonology. The historical account of Modern Beijing/Modern Cantonese is construed as a set of derivations. The input to a derivation is a reconstructed Middle Chinese form; the input is subjected to a battery of (ordered) phonological rules; and the output of the derivation is the reflex in the modern dialect.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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