PROBLEMS OF IDERARCHY AND INDETERMINACY IN MANDARIN PHONOLOGY

0. Introduction. It seems appropriate to greet Y. R. Chao with a paper on two aspects of phonologic analysis which have attracted increasing attention in the years since he first directed interest · toward them in his paper The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems (1934). I shall refer to these two aspects as problems of hierarchy and problems of indeterminacy, and I shall discuss them in relation to the structure of Mandarin Chinese. This paper has developed from-an earlier unupublished one (titled Subsidiary phonemic systems in Mandarin) written while I was studying under Chao at the University of California.