230 research outputs found
Proceedings of the fifth International Conference on Asian Geolinguistics
This volume contains papers presented at the fifth International Conference on Asian Geolinguistics (ICAG) held at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, VNU, Ha Noi, Vietnam, from 4 to 5 May, 2023
Mainland Southeast Asia
The languages of Mainland South East Asia belong to five language phyla, yet they are often claimed to constitute a linguistic area. This chapter’s primary goal is to illustrate the areal features found in their prosodic systems while emphasizing their understated diversity. The first part of the chapter addresses the typology of word-level prosody. It describes common word shapes and stress patterns in the region, discusses tone inventories, and argues that beyond pitch, properties such as phonation and duration frequently play a role in patterns of tonal contrasts. The chapter next shows that complex tone alternations, although not typical, are attested in the area. The following section reviews evidence about prosodic phrasing in the area, discusses the substantial body of knowledge about intonation, and reconsiders the question of intonation in languages with complex tone paradigms and pervasive final particles. The chapter concludes with strategies for marking information structure and focus
Southern Hokkien: An Introduction: What We Did and Why We Did What We Did
Southern Hokkien (Minnanhua, Taiwanese), one of the southern Chinese regional languages, is rarely taught in Chinese programmes at European or American universities. This paper sheds light on the design and pedagogical aims of a new comprehensive introduction to Southern Hokkien, and deals with aspects of Southern Hokkien that are found beneficial for an efficient acquisition of this language outside its natural linguistic environment
Strategies for analyzing tone languages
This paper outlines a method of auditory and acoustic analysis for determining the tonemes of a language starting from scratch, drawing on the author’s experience of recording and analyzing tone languages of north-east India. The methodology is applied to a preliminary analysis of tone in the Thang dialect of Khiamniungan, a virtually undocumented language of extreme eastern Nagaland and adjacent areas of the Sagaing Division Myanmar (Burma). Following a discussion of strategies for ensuring that data appropriate for tonal analysis will be recorded, the practical demonstration begins with a description of how tone categories can be established according to their syllable type in the preliminary auditory analysis. The paper then uses this data to describe a method of acoustic analysis that ultimately permits the representation of pitch shapes as a function of absolute mean duration. The analysis of grammatical tones, floating tones and tone sandhi are exemplified with Mongsen Ao data, and a description of a perception test demonstrates how this can be used to corroborate the auditory and acoustic analysis of a tone system. *This paper is in the series How to Study a Tone Language, edited by Steven Bird and Larry HymanNational Foreign Language Resource Cente
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
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