Sound Patterns in Mandarin Recycling Repair

The objective of the present research is to investigate the ways in which Mandarin interlocutors utilize prosodic resources as part of the means to achieve interactional actions and sequential-organization in natural conversation. By approaches of interactional prosody and conversational phonetics toward the analysis of sound realization of Mandarin repair in natural conversation, this study provides a preliminary exploration on how the combination of detailed prosodic features forms various sound patterns in reflecting the interactional aspect and sequential organization of Mandarin conversation. The current study examines the particular example of recycling repair, defined as “a repeat of part of a conversational turn,” among all methods used in accomplishing Mandarin same-turn self-repair. The data corpus consists of 260 cases of recycling repair culled from a collection of both video- and audio-taped naturally occurring Mandarin conversation. For each recycling, acoustic measurements, including duration, pitch, silence, cut-off and lengthening were carried out by using Praat. Additional judgments would be made based on the analyst’s impressionistic interpretation of these acoustic cues. After taking measurements, the results were compared and the sound patterns that emerged from recyclings of the same sound manifestation were identified. By a qualitative case-study methodology, this thesis reports 6 sound patterns and 3 sub-patterns based on 112 cases of Mandarin recyclings selected. The findings from the current research highlight the interaction-specific, sequence-specific, and function-specific examples of recyclings in relation to the use of the 6 main prosodic patterns. 3 sub-patterns that share some similarity with 2 of the 6 sound patterns in terms of interactional function were further identified. The result from the current exploratory work on the correlation between sound patterns in Mandarin recyclings and interaction contributes significantly to an interdisciplinary study that focuses on broadening the interactional linguistic theory by paying close attention to the sound patterns in natural conversation

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

Variation, norms and prescribed standard in the Mandarin Chinese spoken in Singapore

Relatório de estágio do mestrado em Economia, apresentado à Faculdade de Economia da Universidade de Coimbra, sob a orientação de Carlos Carreira e Edgar Silva.No decorrer do estágio curricular, verificou-se o incremento do número de processos de insolvência de empresas-clientes da My Business, a entidade de acolhimento do presente estágio curricular. A recessão económica de 2008-2012 teve um grande impacto na economia portuguesa, refletindo-se na dinâmica das empresas, onde se observam variações significativas das taxas de entrada e saída de empresas e de criação e destruição de emprego nos diversos sectores. Este trabalho tem um duplo objetivo: primeiro, apresentar e enquadrar sectorialmente e regionalmente a entidade de acolhimento; segundo, analisar os efeitos da crise económica na dinâmica da indústria transformadora portuguesa. Na sua concretização adotou-se uma abordagem não experimental, delineando uma via descritiva e exploratória. Entre 2008 e 2012, observou-se um aumento substancial na destruição de emprego relativamente ao período de pré-crise e um pico na taxa de saída de empresas do mercado em 2011, coincidindo com a aplicação do Memorando de Entendimento. A saída de empresas parece ser influenciada negativamente por variáveis como o nível de produtividade e a dimensão da empresa. A entrada de empresas não apresenta qualquer impacto estatisticamente significativo na taxa de risco de saída das empresas. Durante o período de crise, as restrições financeiras das empresas são preponderantes sobre a produtividade no risco de saída

Post-focal compression as a prosodic cue for focus perception in Hindi

Focus in Hindi is prosodically marked by means of post-focal compression (PFC) and the present study examines whether PFC is a prosodic cue that is functionally used by listeners to perceive the focus. In a production study with 30 native Hindi speakers uttering six different ambiguous contrastive ellipsis structures PFC occurred after the focused indirect object, thought not after a focused direct object. These structures served as input for a forced-choice sentence-completion experiment, in which 18 listeners listened to sentence fragments of the matrix clause and were asked to decide which of the two possible objects contrasts (direct object or indirect object) would correctly complete the sentence. Results show that if PFC was absent listeners were unable to choose the intended sentence completion. If PFC was present correct sentence completion judgements increased significantly. Thus PFC is a cue for focus perception in Hindi. Based on the functional load of the pitch register in Hindi, we argue that pitch register represents a further intonational category to consider, at least for languages like Hindi

Tone and intonation: introductory notes and practical recommendations

International audienceThe present article aims to propose a simple introduction to the topics of (i) lexical tone, (ii) intonation, and (iii) tone-intonation interactions, with practical recommendations for students. It builds on the authors' observations on various languages, tonal and non-tonal; much of the evidence reviewed concerns tonal languages of Asia. With a view to providing beginners with an adequate methodological apparatus for studying tone and intonation, the present notes emphasize two salient dimensions of linguistic diversity. The first is the nature of the lexical tones: we review the classical distinction between (i) contour tones that can be analyzed into sequences of level tones, and (ii) contour tones that are non-decomposable (phonetically complex). A second dimension of diversity is the presence or absence of intonational tones: tones of intonational origin that are formally identical with lexical (and morphological) tones

Tone sandhi, prosodic phrasing, and focus marking in Wenzhou Chinese

In most languages, focus (i.e. highlighting information) is marked by modifying the melody of the sentence. But how is focus marked in a Chinese dialect with eight different citation tones and a complex tonal phonology?This thesis investigates the connection between tonal realization and tone change (tone sandhi) in Wenzhou Chinese, and whether and how such a connection is conditioned by prosodic structure and focus marking. Experiments were conducted with young speakers of Wenzhou Chinese, whose speech was acoustically analyzed so as to investigate the application domain of tone sandhi and the influence of focus thereon, the tonal realization on the word and phrase level and its interaction with focus, the pre-planning of sentential pitch, as well as the realization of referents with different information statuses. The experimental findings suggest that the application, but not the implementation, of tone sandhi is independent of focus, and that focus and prosodic structure have similar but independent effects on the realization of lexical tones. It is also shown that pitch scaling is sensitive to syntactic structure and complexity, and that the marking of givenness, broad focus, and narrow focus leads to discrete levels along the same acoustic parameters. These findings are of interest to researchers working on lexical tone, prosodic structure, and how information structure categories such as focus affect tonal realization and prosodic phrasing.LEI Universiteit LeidenNWO VIDI grant 061084338 to dr. Y. ChenLanguage Use in Past and Presen

Juncture prosody across languages: Similar production but dissimilar perception

How do speakers of languages with different intonation systems produce and perceive prosodic junctures in sentences with identical structural ambiguity? Native speakers of English and of Mandarin produced potentially ambiguous sentences with a prosodic juncture either earlier in the utterance (e.g., “He gave her # dog biscuits,” “他给她#狗饼干 ”), or later (e.g., “He gave her dog # biscuits,” “他给她狗 #饼干 ”). These productiondata showed that prosodic disambiguation is realised very similarly in the two languages, despite some differences in the degree to which individual juncture cues (e.g., pausing) were favoured. In perception experiments with a new disambiguation task, requiring speeded responses to select the correct meaning for structurally ambiguous sentences, language differences in disambiguation response time appeared: Mandarin speakers correctly disambiguated sentences with earlier juncture faster than those with later juncture, while English speakers showed the reverse. Mandarin-speakers with L2 English did not show their native-language response time pattern when they heard the English ambiguous sentences. Thus even with identical structural ambiguity and identically cued production, prosodic juncture perception across languages can differ

Juncture prosody across languages : similar production but dissimilar perception

How do speakers of languages with different intonation systems produce and perceive prosodic junctures in sentences with identical structural ambiguity? Native speakers of English and of Mandarin produced potentially ambiguous sentences with a prosodic juncture either earlier in the utterance (e.g., “He gave her # dog biscuits,” “他给她 # 狗饼干”), or later (e.g., “He gave her dog # biscuits,” “他给她狗 # 饼干”). These production data showed that prosodic disambiguation is realized very similarly in the two languages, despite some differences in the degree to which individual juncture cues (e.g., pausing) were favoured. In perception experiments with a new disambiguation task, requiring speeded responses to select the correct meaning for structurally ambiguous sentences, language differences in disambiguation response time appeared: Mandarin speakers correctly disambiguated sentences with earlier juncture faster than those with later juncture, while English speakers showed the reverse. Mandarin speakers also showed higher levels of accuracy in disambiguation compared to English speakers, indicating language-specific differences in the extent to which prosodic cues are used. However, Mandarin, but not English, speakers showed a decrease in accuracy when pausing cues were removed. Thus even with high similarity in both structural ambiguity and production cues, prosodic juncture perception across languages can differ