Within Mandarin Chinese, why do some instances of tone sandhi unexpectedly fail to apply at a prosodic domain boundary?

💡 Explanation

Tone sandhi fails at domain boundaries because the presence of a higher-level prosodic boundary, such as an intonational phrase, blocks the application of the tone sandhi rule. This is because prosodic hierarchy constraints outweigh local tonal coarticulation, therefore sandhi is prevented rather than overriding the higher-level intonational structure.

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