| Abstract: | The retroflex suffixation is one of the interesting phonological phenomena in Beijing Mandarin and has engendered much discussion. But most of the discussions are made from social, historical and experimental points of view. Recently, some of the scholars overseas have applied different theories of Generative Linguistics to analyze it and proposed different explanatory theoretic models for it. In this paper, I will first present the data of Mandarin retroflex suffixation reported by different scholars, then introduce some representative models proposed so far to account for Mandarin retroflex suffixation, and finally make a discussion on it from the OT perspective. |
