467 research outputs found
Implications of Autosegmental Analysis in the Exploration of Prosodic Phonology in Mandarin Chinese
Autosegmental Phonology (Goldsmith, 1979) is a theoretical framework for understanding the phonological effects of suprasegmentals such as tone, stress, etc. Using data taken from an experiment in which Mandarin Chinese tone sandhi (the acknowledged rules governing specific tone shifts across segments) is explored, a number of phonologists, specifically Kenstowicz (2003), have shown that the relationship between the segment and the tone is autonomous. In the experiment, non-sense words with a potential tone sandhi rule are presented to the Mandarin speakers. The speakers automatically apply the tone sandhi rule which is then analyzed using an autosegmental framework. The speakers consciously separate the tones from the non-sense words and apply tone sandhi rules; the application of the tone sandhi rule is independent of semantic meaning.
This research is expanded to include the exploration of loanword phonology (the phonological changes that occur when a tonal language borrows non-tonal language words) to further understand the autonomous relationship between tones and segments. As can be seen in the following example, the English word Disney: di2-si1-ni2 (numbers account for the differing tones), certain tones are distributed to loanwords
Tone Sandhi Phenomena In Taiwan Southern Min
This dissertation investigates various aspects of the tone sandhi phenomena in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM). Previous studies have reported complete tonal neutralization between the two sandhi 33 variants derived respectively from citation 55 and 24 variants, leading to the claim that tone sandhi in this language is categorical. The fact that tone sandhi in TSM is assumed to possess a mixture of properties of lexical and postlexical rules gives rise to the debate over the status of this phonological rule.
The findings of the dissertation shows incomplete neutralization between the two sandhi 33 variants with an indication of an ongoing sound change towards a near- or complete tonal merger, possibly led by female speakers. In addition, citation form is proposed to be more underlyingly represented on account of the fact that subjects, especially old speakers, have stronger association with citation variants than with sandhi variants in the priming experiment. The spontaneous corpus study suggests that the Tone Circle is merely a phonological idealization in light of the systematic subphonemic difference in f0 between citation X and sandhi X that are supposed to correspond even with some control of conceivable confounding factors. By comparing direct- and indirect-reference models, I argue that tone sandhi in TSM should be analyzed as a head-left Concatenation rule within a DM-based theoretical framework
Strategies for Representing Tone in African Writing Systems
Tone languages provide some interesting challenges for the designers of new orthographies.
One approach is to omit tone marks, just as stress is not marked in English (zero marking).
Another approach is to do phonemic tone analysis and then make heavy use of diacritic
symbols to distinguish the `tonemes' (exhaustive marking). While orthographies based on
either system have been successful, this may be thanks to our ability to manage inadequate
orthographies rather than to any intrinsic advantage which is afforded by one or the other
approach. In many cases, practical experience with both kinds of orthography in sub-Saharan
Africa has shown that people have not been able to attain the level of reading and writing
fluency that we know to be possible for the orthographies of non-tonal languages. In some
cases this can be attributed to a sociolinguistic setting which does not favour vernacular
literacy. In other cases, the orthography itself might be to blame. If the orthography of a tone
language is difficult to user or to learn, then a good part of the reason, I believe, is that the
designer either has not paid enough attention to the function of tone in the language, or has
not ensured that the information encoded in the orthography is accessible to the ordinary
(non-linguist) user of the language. If the writing of tone is not going to continue to be a
stumbling block to literacy efforts, then a fresh approach to tone orthography is required, one
which assigns high priority to these two factors.
This article describes the problems with orthographies that use too few or too many tone
marks, and critically evaluates a wide range of creative intermediate solutions. I review the
contributions made by phonology and reading theory, and provide some broad methodological
principles to guide someone who is seeking to represent tone in a writing system. The tone
orthographies of several languages from sub-Saharan Africa are presented throughout the
article, with particular emphasis on some tone languages of Cameroon
Language-specificity in auditory perception of Chinese tones
PL1213, LoC Subject Headings: Auditory perception, Chinese language--Tone, Chinese language--Phonolog
Tones in Zhangzhou: Pitch and Beyond
This study draws on various approaches—field linguistics;
auditory and acoustic phonetics; and statistics—to explore and
explain the nature of Zhangzhou tones, an under-described
Southern Min variety. Several original findings emerged from the
analyses of the data from 21 speakers. The realisations of
Zhangzhou tones are multidimensional. The single parameter of
pitch/F0 is not sufficient to characterise tonal contrasts in
either monosyllabic or polysyllabic settings in Zhangzhou.
Instead, various parameters, including pitch/F0, duration, vowel
quality, voice quality, and syllable coda type, interact in a
complicated but consistent way to code tonal distinctions.
Zhangzhou has eight tones rather than seven tones as proposed in
previous studies. This finding resulted from examining the
realisations of diverse parameters across three different
contexts—isolation, phrase-initial, and phrase-final—, rather
than classifying tones in citation and in terms of the
preservation of Middle Chinese tonal categories. Tonal contrasts
in Zhangzhou can be neutralised across different linguistic
contexts. Identifying the number of tonal contrasts based simply
on tonal realisations in the citation environment is not
sufficient. Instead, examining tonal realisations across
different linguistic contexts beyond monosyllables is imperative
for understanding the nature of tone.
Tone sandhi in Zhangzhou is syntactically relevant. The tone
sandhi domain is not phonologically determined but rather is
aligned with a syntactic phrase XP. Within a given XP, the
realisations of the tones at non-phrase-final positions undergo
alternation phonologically and phonetically. Nevertheless, the
alterations are sensitive only to the phrase boundaries and are
not affected by the internal structure of syntactic phrases.
Tone sandhi in Zhangzhou is phonologically inert but phonetically
sensitive. The realisations of Zhangzhou tones in disyllabic
phrases are not categorically affected by their surrounding tones
but are phonetically sensitive to surrounding environments. For
instance, the pitch/F0 onsets of phrase-final tones are largely
sensitive to pitch/F0 offsets of preceding tones and appear to
have diverse variants.
The mappings between Zhangzhou citation and disyllabic tones are
morphologically conditioned. Phrase-initial tones are largely not
related to the citation tones at either the phonological or the
phonetic level while phrase-final tones are categorically related
to the citation tones but phonetically are not quite the same
because of predictable sensitivity to surrounding environments.
Each tone in Zhangzhou can be regarded as a single morpheme
having two alternating allomorphs (tonemes), one for
non-phrase-final variants and one for variants in citation and
phrase-final contexts, both of which are listed in the mental
lexicon of native Zhangzhou speakers but are phonetically distant
on the surface.
In summary, the realisations of Zhangzhou tones are
multidimensional, involving a variety of segmental and
suprasegmental parameters. The interactions of Zhangzhou tones
are complicated, involving phonetics, phonology, syntax, and
morphology. Neutralisation of Zhangzhou tonal contrasts occurs
across different contexts, including citation, phrase-final, and
non-phrase-final. Thus, researchers must go beyond pitch to
understand tone thoroughly as a phenomenon in Southern Min
Observing the contribution of both underlying and surface representations: Evidence from priming and event-related potentials
This dissertation aims to uncover the role of the acoustic input (the surface representation) and the abstract linguistic representation (the underlying representation) as listeners map the signal during spoken word recognition. To examine these issues, tone sandhi, a tonal alternation phenomenon in which a tone changes to a different tone in certain phonological environments, is investigated. This dissertation first examined how productive Mandarin tone 3 sandhi words (T3 → T2/___T3) are processed and represented. An auditory priming lexical decision experiment was conducted in which each disyllabic tone 3 sandhi target was preceded by a tone 2 monosyllable (surface-tone overlap), a tone 3 monosyllable (underlying-tone overlap), or an unrelated monosyllable (unrelated control). Lexical decision RTs showed a tone 3 (underlying-tone overlap) facilitation effect for both high and low frequency words. A second priming study investigated the processing and representation of the more complex and less productive Taiwanese tone sandhi. Lexical decision RTs, examining sandhi 24 → 33 and 51 → 55, showed that while both sandhi types exhibited facilitatory priming effects, underlying tone primes showed significantly more facilitation than surface primes for sandhi 24 → 33, while surface tone primes showed significantly more facilitation than underlying primes for sandhi 51 → 55, with both effects modulated by frequency. A third study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine Mandarin tone 3 sandhi. Using an oddball paradigm, participants passively listened to either Tone 2 standards ([tʂu2 je4] /tʂu2 je4/), Tone 3 standards ([tʂu3 je4] /tʂu3 je4/), Tone Sandhi standards ([tʂu2 jen3] /tʂu3 jen3/), or Mix standards (i.e., both tone 3 sandhi and tone 3 words), occasionally interspersed with a tone 2 word [tʂu2] (i.e., the deviant). Results showed a mismatch negativity (MMN) in the Tone 2 condition but not in the Sandhi condition, suggesting different neural processing mechanisms for Tone 2 and Sandhi words. Together, the current data suggest that the underlying tone contributes more to the processing of productive tone sandhi and the surface tone contributes more to the processing of less productive tone sandhi. In general, this dissertation provides evidence for the representation and processing of words that involve phonological alternation, both within the same language and across different languages
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Neutral Tone in Mandarin: Representation and Interaction with Utterance-level Prosody
In Standard Mandarin, there are syllables that do not carry any of the four citation tones (T1: High-level tone, T2: Mid-rising tone, T3: Low-convex tone and T4: High-falling tone), and they are said to have a neutral tone (NT). These syllables are usually shorter, lighter, prosodically grouped with the preceding CT-bearing syllables. These characteristics of NT have led to a prevailing view that it has no underlying phonological specification. However, research has focused more on how the surface pitch variations of NT are realized rather than the underlying representation of NT.
In contrast, morphological, sociolinguistic and diachronic work on NT has suggested that NT may not be a homogeneous entity. In this thesis, I provide acoustic and psycholinguistic evidence that there are two types of NT, Intrinsic NT and Derived NT. Intrinsic NT refers to morphemes that were lexicalized as tone-deleted, unstressed syllables even before the formation of the four CTs of modern Mandarin. Derived NT refers to morphemes derived from the CTs via stress-related tone-deletion.
In Part A, the phonological representation of Intrinsic and Derived NT is explored through two production and two processing experiments. The results show that Intrinsic NT is likely to have an underspecified tonal target while Derived NTs are underlyingly CTs. In addition, both subtypes of NT are metrically light, unlike heavy CTs.
Part B explores the interaction between NTs and utterance-level prosody in production and perception experiments. NT-bearing syllables have lengthening patterns under focus similar to CT-bearing syllables, in contrast to the realization of unstressed syllables in English. In perception, the identification of intonation (Statement vs. Question) on Intrinsic NT was similar to Derived NT. When compared to CTs, the NTs elicit less bias towards question than T4, and higher accuracy than T2, which may result from their simpler surface representations.CHINA Scholarship COUNCIL (CSC) and Cambridge Trus
Aspects of phonetics, phonology and morphophonology of Thok Reel
This dissertation presents the first descriptive study of a hitherto undocumented Western Nilotic language Thok Reel. The language is spoken in Southern Sudan by a minority ethnic group known as Atuot.
The study presents a descriptive account of Thok Reel phonetics, phonology and morphophonology. The description follows the topics on word and syllable structure, consonants, vowels, and tone. Each section accounts for the phonological distinctions and provides the phonetic description of the phenomena that is either typologically unusual or deviates from what is attested in related languages.
Thok Reel is a predominantly monosyllabic language with rich morphology. Morphological inflection to a large extent is expressed by means of alternations of phonological material on the monosyllabic roots. The description of morphophonology provides an account of the alternations in vowel quality, voice quality, vowel length and root-final consonants. The description is restricted to subject agreement marking in finite transitive and antipassive verbs in simple declarative sentences. The findings of this study show that there is more complexity in transitive verbs than in antipassive verbs with respect to vowel length alternations, and that transitive verbs show simpler behaviour than the antipassive with respect to voice and vowel quality alternations. Thok Reel shows more complexity with respect to vowel length alternations than is attested in related languages. One of the important findings of this study is that in Thok Reel the three levels of vowel length can be lexical.
The description of the tone system consists of phonetic and phonological accounts. The three tonemes High (H), Low (L) and High-Low (HL) are realised within a narrow frequency range and are distinguished almost solely by f0 alignment (pitch movements). The HL tone is typologically unusual in that, although there is evidence for it being a composite tone, it does not always behave as is expected of a tone composed of H and L components. In sentences, tone sandhi processes and a contextual modification alter the phonological status of the two tonemes H and HL. The ordering of these processes varies at different levels of derivation, described as phrase-level and sentence-level. The onset of sandhi and its direction in sentences with finite transitive verbs is shown to deviate from the common pattern found in sentences with other types of verbs. It is argued that in sentences with finite transitive verbs tone sandhi is used by syntax to mark the juncture between the verb and its object
Thoughts on analogy and some problems in interpreting phonological experiments
An inconclusive pilot study in Danish phonology gives rise to questions about testible differences between explanation by analogical algorithm versus rules. The literature on analogy shows its resistance to valid limitations on its operation in terms of markedness, similarity, or on the basis of purely conceptual or grammatical considerations. It is argued that being the less constrained mechanism, it is inferior as a working hypothesis to rules. It is suggested that the convincing instances of synchronic analogy are special cases where a speaker resorts to a more basic cognitive strategy as ill-defined and hence powerful as our ability to recognize similar aspects of nonidentical complexes
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