The phenomenon of incomplete neutralisation describes a situation where a putative case of categorical phonological neutralisation is observed to be phonetically non-neutralising. This has been argued to be a problem for phonological theories that employ categorical features. Here, we use two distinct feeding orders of tone sandhi processes from Huai’an Mandarin to show that incomplete phonetic neutralisation is compatible with categorical phonological phenomena. Therefore, incomplete phonetic neutralisation does not automatically inform us of gradient phonological representations. We further show that incomplete phonetic neutralisation can in fact have a large effect size. Such results are not surprising from a classic generative view of phonology where linguistic performance is argued to be a multi-factorial problem, and linguistic knowledge (i.e., competence) is only one of the many factors involved. Furthermore, our results suggest that the observed incompleteness or gradience may have a source outside phonological knowledge.

不完全中和现象描述了一种情况，其中观察到绝对语音中和的假定情况在语音上是非中和的。这被认为是采用范畴特征的语音理论的一个问题。在这里，我们使用淮安官话的两种不同的变调过程的馈送顺序来表明不完全语音中和与分类音系现象是兼容的。因此，不完全的语音中和不会自动告知我们梯度语音表示。我们进一步表明，不完全的语音中和实际上可以产生很大的影响。从音系学的经典生成观点来看，这样的结果并不奇怪，其中语言表现被认为是一个多因素问题，而语言知识（即能力）只是所涉及的众多因素之一。此外，我们的结果表明，观察到的不完整性或梯度可能有语​​音知识之外的来源。