Moraic Footing in Suzhou Chinese: Evidence from Toneless Moras

The current study provides additional phonetic data for the light-initial sandhi patterns in Suzhou Chinese, illustrating a context-sensitive pitch alternation that is not present after heavy-initial forms, and has not been attested in other neighboring Northern Wu varieties either. I propose that such pitch alternation is due to interpolation effects on toneless prosodic constituents, here toneless moras. A binary trochee built directly on moras yields an unparsed (i.e. toneless) final mora in light-heavy disyllables, accounting for the pitch patterns on the surface. Such an analysis is not only empirically adequate, but also echoes the cross-linguistic structural observation that a foot head lighter in weight than the dependent is generally dispreferred (Head-Dependent Asymmetry; cf. Dresher and van der Hulst 1998)

Prosodic Focus Within and Across Languages

The fact that purely prosodic marking of focus may be weaker in some languages than in others, and that it varies in certain circumstances even within a single language, has not been commonly recognized. Therefore, this dissertation investigated whether and how purely prosodic marking of focus varies within and across languages. We conducted production and perception experiments using a paradigm of 10-digit phone-number strings in which the same material and discourse contexts were used in different languages. The results demonstrated that prosodic marking of focus varied across languages. Speakers of American English, Mandarin Chinese, and Standard French clearly modulated duration, pitch, and intensity to indicate the position of corrective focus. Listeners of these languages recognized the focus position with high accuracy. Conversely, speakers of Seoul Korean, South Kyungsang Korean, Tokyo Japanese, and Suzhou Wu produced a weak and ambiguous modulation by focus, resulting in a poor identification performance. This dissertation also revealed that prosodic marking of focus varied even within a single language. In Mandarin Chinese, a focused low/dipping tone (tone 3) received a relatively poor identification rate compared to other focused tones (about 77% vs. 91%). This lower identification performance was due to the smaller capacity of tone 3 for pitch range expansion and local dissimilatory effects around tone 3 focus. In Seoul Korean, prosodic marking of focus differed based on the tonal contrast (post-lexical low vs. high tones). The identification rate of high tones was twice as high than that of low tones (about 24% vs. 51%), the reason being that low tones had a smaller capacity for pitch range expansion than high tones. All things considered, this dissertation demonstrates that prosodic focus is not always expressed by concomitant increased duration, pitch, and intensity. Accordingly, purely prosodic marking of focus is neither completely universal nor automatic, but rather is expressed through the prosodic structure of each language. Since the striking difference in focus-marking success does not seem to be determined by any previously-described typological feature, this must be regarded as an indicator of a new typological dimension, or as a function of a new typological space

Variable Pitch Realization of Unparsed Moras in Suzhou Chinese: Evaluation Through F0 Trajectory Simulation and Classification

This study aims to tease apart two proposals regarding the phonetic realization of toneless TBUs: that they are realized with default (often L) tones (Yip 2002; Zhang 2016), or that they stay without phonological tones and surface as interpolated pitch between tonal targets (Pierrehumbert & Beckman 1988; Zhang et al. 2019). The original fieldwork data of toneless moras in Suzhou Chinese (Northern Wu) demonstrated considerable variation in toneless realization, both across- and within-speaker. Assessed by the simulation & classification framework of Shaw and Kawahara (2018), some speakers more frequently used interpolation between tones (e.g., high level between Hs, low rising between L and H), while others realized the toneless mora with a relatively low pitch regardless of the tonal context. In addition, tonal contexts also affected how toneless moras were realized, with more interpolation when the toneless moras were surrounded by two Hs, and more default L insertion when the mora was preceded by L and followed by H. There was no unified way of toneless realization in Suzhou, much like a model of probablistic/variable phonological process would predict (Coetzee & Pater 2011; Coetzee & Kawahara 2013)

Extending the Autosegmental Input Strictly Local Framework: Metrical Dominance and Floating Tones

This paper extends the empirical coverage of the Autosegmental Input Strictly Local (A-ISL) framework (Chandlee and Jardine, 2019) by analyzing three tonal processes: floating tone suffixation in Cantonese, metrical dominance effect in Shanghai Chinese, and a combination of floating tones and metrical dominance in Suzhou Chinese. I show both the adequacy and inadequacy of the current A-ISL framework: it locally resolves some tonal processes that are otherwise non-local (Shanghai), but fails to account for other empirical data due to a lack of tonal membership specification (Suzhou). With the addition of a morphological affiliation tier, I propose an analysis for the Suzhou data. The paper contributes to our typological knowledge of computational locality and autosegmental phonological representations

Phonological Prominence and Its Interaction with Tone in Chinese Dialects

Earlier studies on Chinese have recognized that there are prominent positions, and there are interactions between tone and prominent positions. However, the earlier studies have not rigorously applied phonetic or phonological inspections for establishing prominent positions in Chinese. When more rigorous phonetic and phonological examinations have been applied in this study, a more constrained and principled set of prominence phenomena emerged. This set excludes the postulation of a generalized trochaic system in Standard Mandarin, accentual prominence in New Chongming and peripheral prominence in Zhenhai. On the other hand, this set includes metrical prominence in the Northern Wu dialects and Fengkai Cantonese, and the interaction between tone and metrically prominent positions. In this study, two types of interaction between metrical prominence and tone are attested. First, metrically strong positions are characterized by the preservation of lexical tones, or the ability to determine the shape of the neighboring tones. Thus, the stressed position normally licenses a larger range of tonal contrast. Unstressed syllables tend to go tonal modification, reduction, or loss. Second, tone can condition stress placement. Observations made in the Northern Wu dialects suggest that stress assignment is sensitive to tone properties. In the Northern Wu group, the distribution of stress tends to avoid syllables with a low tone, or a short tone. To summarize, although Chinese is widely recognized as a canonical tone language, stress and tone as two independent phonological properties do co-exist in Chinese. The co-existence of tone and stress leads to some interesting interactions. However, tone-stress interaction in Chinese produces a limited set of phonological processes, which is only attested in a limited number of dialects

Phonetic Temporal Neural Model for Language Identification

Deep neural models, particularly the LSTM-RNN model, have shown great potential for language identification (LID). However, the use of phonetic information has been largely overlooked by most existing neural LID methods, although this information has been used very successfully in conventional phonetic LID systems. We present a phonetic temporal neural model for LID, which is an LSTM-RNN LID system that accepts phonetic features produced by a phone-discriminative DNN as the input, rather than raw acoustic features. This new model is similar to traditional phonetic LID methods, but the phonetic knowledge here is much richer: it is at the frame level and involves compacted information of all phones. Our experiments conducted on the Babel database and the AP16-OLR database demonstrate that the temporal phonetic neural approach is very effective, and significantly outperforms existing acoustic neural models. It also outperforms the conventional i-vector approach on short utterances and in noisy conditions.Comment: Submitted to TASL

Lack of Prosodic Focus in Chongqing Dialect and Possible Historical Sources

This study investigates Chongqing Dialect, a language largely used in Southwest China which is mutually intelligible to Beijing Mandarin speakers. Phonetic variations triggered by focus in Chongqing Dialect, especially in the form of post-focus compression (PFC), are investigated in terms of max F0, mean F0, duration and intensity. A follow-up perception test is also conducted. The production experiment shows that there are no significant changes from no focus condition to focus condition in the factors analysed, and no PFC is observed in Chongqing Dialect. The perception test shows a rather low identification rate at around 40%. The results of this study support the hypothesis that there is a typological divide within the Chinese languages, and the reason is explored by an analysis of the historical roots of Chongqing Dialect. As a representative of Southwest Mandarin, the lack of PFC in Chongqing Dialect suggests that many other Southwest Mandarin dialects also may not have PFC

Prosodic focus in three northern Wu dialects: Wuxi, Suzhou and Ningbo

The present study investigated three northern Wu dialects: Wuxi, Suzhou, and Ningbo. It is found that, in all three dialects, focus is encoded by increasing the maximum F0 and duration of focused words, and lowering and compressing the F0 and pitch range of post-focus words. These results are consistent with previous findings about Wu dialect in Shanghai. Northern Wu dialects therefore seem to encode focus in a similar way to Beijing Mandarin, but different from many languages/dialects spoken in southern China. This finding, together with evidence from gene studies and migration history of Wu areas, provide further support for the inheritance hypothesis of PFC, according to which all languages with PFC are descendants of a common proto-language in the Middle East

Temporal articulatory stability, phonological variation, and lexical contrast preservation in diaspora Tibetan

This dissertation examines how lexical tone can be represented with articulatory gestures, and the ways a gestural perspective can inform synchronic and diachronic analysis of the phonology and phonetics of a language. Tibetan is chosen an example of a language with interacting laryngeal and tonal phonology, a history of tonogenesis and dialect diversification, and recent contact-induced realignment of the tonal and consonantal systems. Despite variation in voice onset time (VOT) and presence/absence of the lexical tone contrast, speakers retain a consistent relative timing of consonant and vowel gestures. Recent research has attempted to integrate tone into the framework of Articulatory Phonology through the addition of tone gestures. Unlike other theories of phonetics-phonology, Articulatory Phonology uniquely incorporates relative timing as a key parameter. This allows the system to represent contrasts instantiated not just in the presence or absence of gestures, but also in how gestures are timed with each other. Building on the different predictions of various timing relations, along with the historical developments in the language, hypotheses are generated and tested with acoustic and articulatory experiments. Following an overview of relevant theory, the second chapter surveys past literature on the history of sound change and present phonological diversity of Tibetic dialects. Whereas Old Tibetan lacked lexical tone, contrasted voiced and voiceless obstruents, and exhibited complex clusters, a series of overlapping sound changes have led to some modern varieties that are tone, lack clusters, and vary in the expression of voicing and aspiration. Furthermore, speakers in the Tibetan diaspora use a variety that has grown out of the contact between diverse Tibetic dialects. The state of the language and the dynamics of diaspora have created a situation ripe for sound change, including the recombination of elements from different dialects and, potentially, the loss of tone contrasts. The nature of the diaspora Tibetan is investigated through an acoustic corpus study. Recordings made in Kathmandu, Nepal, are being transcribed and forced-aligned into a useful audio corpus. Speakers in the corpus come from diverse backgrounds across and outside traditional Tibetan-speaking regions, but the analysis presented here focuses on speakers who grew up in diaspora, with a mixed input of Standard Tibetan (spyi skad) and other Tibetan varieties. Especially notable among these speakers is the high variability of voice onset time (VOT) and its interaction with tone. An analysis of this data in terms of the relative timing of oral, laryngeal, and tone gestures leads to the generation of hypotheses for testing using articulatory data. The articulatory study is conducted using electromagnetic articulography (EMA), and six Tibetan-speaking participants. The key finding is that the relative timing of consonant and vowel gestures is consistent across phonological categories and across speakers who do and do not contrast tone. This result leads to the conclusion that the relative timing of speech gestures is conserved and acquired independently. Speakers acquire and generalize a limited inventory of timing patterns, and can use timing patterns even when the conditioning environment for the development of those patterns, namely tone, has been lost