Phonetic vs. Phonological Considerations in Inter-Generational Vowel Change in Toronto Heritage Cantonese

Chang et al. (2011) have shown that phonological considerations may override phonetic similarity in influencing the phonetic production of /u/ and /y/ among heritage Mandarin speakers. This study addresses whether or not this generalization holds for another heritage language with a similar contrast corresponding to one vowel category, /u/, in the dominant language (English) by comparing vowel production among GEN 1 (L1 Cantonese) and GEN 2 (English-Cantonese early bilinguals) speakers. The mean F1 and F2 of 30 vowel tokens of /u/ and /y/ from each of 17 speakers from the HerLD (Heritage Language Documentation) Corpus (Nagy 2011) were measured (N=510). Results show maintenance of the Cantonese /y/ ~ /u/ contrast and lack of assimilation of Cantonese /u/ to the relatively high F2 of Toronto English /u/. These results support Chang et al’s (2011) claim that early bilingualism favors maintenance of cross-linguistic and language internal phonological distinctions in both languages

Retroflexion in Somali Bantu Kizigua: Language Shift and a Contact-Induced Explanation to What Looks Like an Internally Motivated Sound Change

As discussed by Thomason & Kaufman (1988: 111), there has long been a bias among historical linguists against explanations based on shift-induced interference and that this is partly due to a methodological problem that arises in shift situations: Language shift often means language loss and the loss of key linguistic evidence to support such analyses. In this talk, I present a case study in which sufficient diachronic evidence is available to show shift-induced interference involved in a sound change that looks like one due to internal motivation but is in fact not. The change in question is the retroflexion of historic alveolar NC clusters in Somali Bantu Kizigua (SBK), an under-documented dialect of the Zigua language from Tanzania that diverged from Tanzanian Zigua (TZ) during the 19th Century as a result of migration. I argue that what gives this appearance is the genetic relatedness (Epps et al 2013) of the contact language involved, Chimwiini. Data sources include dictionaries of TZ (Kisbey 1906, Mochiwa 2008), a 700-word lexicon of the present-day language compiled from consultant work, and published data from Chimwiini (Nurse & Hinnebusch 1993, Kisseberth & Abasheikh 2004). The linguistic data was complemented by various sources describing the socio-political history of southern Somalia. All words in the SBK data containing retroflex NC (/ɳʈ/ and /ɳɖ/) have corresponding forms with alveolar NC (/nt/ and /nd/) in both contemporary (Mochiwa 2008) and in turn of the 20th century (Kisbey 1906) TZ. This across-the-board change in inherited vocabulary suggests that retroflexion developed due to internal motivation. However, if we acknowledge the fact that there was historic contact with Chimwiini speakers and that some shifted to Kizigua, we can see two other possibilities by comparing the two languages: borrowing and interference through shift (following Thomason & Kaufman’s [1988] distinction). If this were a case of borrowing from Chimwiini, we would expect all words with retroflexion in SBK to have corresponding forms in Chimwiini, but this is not the case. Interference through shift, on the other hand, would have involved native Chimwiini speakers learning Kizigua thereby introducing substrate features including substitution of alveolar NC with retroflex NC. This would have applied across-the-board and since related languages are involved, the high degree of lexical similarity would have made this substitution process look like a Neogrammarian sound change. The retroflex pronunciation would have then been passed down to subsequent generations of Kizigua speakers. By showing how a specific type of contact-induced change can give rise to a pattern resembling one due to internal motivation, the larger implication of this study is in raising the question of how many other cases of sound change previously described as due to internal motivation may have actually been due to contact with languages (or dialects) for which we lack data

The Phonetics of VOT and Tone Interaction in Cantonese

This study investigates the possible effects of lexical tone on Voice Onset Time (VOT) in Cantonese, a tonal language with a two-way contrast between short-lag (voiceless unaspirated) and long-lag (voiceless aspirated) stops. VOT was measured as the time interval between the stop burst and the onset of voicing for the following vowel. The recorded speech of 6 native speakers each producing 10 repetitions of 20 different words contrasting in aspiration and tone was analyzed. Tokens from each individual subject were divided into two sets for the purpose of comparison. The first set involved a comparison between the effects of a high-level 55 tone and a mid-level 33 tone. Results showed no significant VOT differences unless aspirated and unaspirated stops were examined separately. In this case, only the aspirated stops showed a significant difference with the 33 tone associated with higher VOT. The second set of stimuli compared the effects of 4 different phonemic tone categories (55, 25, 33, and 21) on VOT. Results show that words beginning with a lower tonal onset (and thus the 25 and 21 tones) correlated with higher VOT than words beginning with a higher tonal onset (the 55 and 33 tones)

Lexical Tone vs. F0 Effects on VOT in Cantonese

This study investigates the effects of lexical tone on the Voice Onset Time (VOT) of prevocalic stops in Cantonese. It builds on literature showing how various factors affect VOT without a resultant loss in phonological contrast and also ties in a body of research on tone and consonant interaction. The specific research questions addressed are (1) Does tone have an effect on VOT in Cantonese?; (2) If so, what kind of an effect does it have?; and (3) Is this effect purely an automatic articulatory consequence of F0 modulation or is this effect also mediated by lexical tone and hence a secondary cue that contributes towards maintaining phonological contrasts between different tonal categories? To address these questions, the speech of 6 native speakers (5 male and 1 female) of Hong Kong Cantonese was examined. A total of 80 tokens of words contrasting in tone and aspiration were analyzed for each speaker for a grand total of 480 tokens. Results from an ANOVA test showed that there is a statistically significant effect (

Constructing the Chinese Language: Linguistic Ideology, Culture, and Nation-State Politics

The purpose of this thesis is to critically examine “the Chinese language” and all of its variant forms as examples of language or linguistic ideologies, a term many linguistic anthropologists have used to describe conceptualizations of language and their perceived social function. More specifically, I adopt Judith Irvine and Susan Gal’s (2000) semiotic approach to language ideology by examining how it is reinforced through what they call iconicity, erasure, and fractal recursivity. Ideologies are articulated from many different sites and are often contested with competing ideologies. I will discuss how these ideologies inform current debates about language and writing system reform as well as efforts to promote a standard national language. Ultimately, this paper challenges the notion of the homogeneity of a Chinese identity and of a Chinese language

Contact-induced splits in Toronto Heritage Cantonese mid-vowels

This paper illustrates how contact can facilitate the development of phonemic and allophonic splits bypresenting results from a study of vowel variation and change in Toronto Cantonese, a variety of Cantonesespoken in a heritage language contact setting. The data includes hour-long sociolinguistic interviewsfrom speakers from two different generational backgrounds. The vowel space of each of 20speakers was created based on F1 and F2 measurements of 105 tokens per speaker (15 tokens for eachof 7 monophthongs). This paper focuses on the results for two of the mid vowels (/ɛ/ and /ɔ/) wherethere is evidence for the development of two phonetically conditioned splits based on velar context. Athird split, discussed in Tse (In Press), may have triggered the development of these two splits amongsecond-generation speakers. Phonological influence from Toronto English is one possible explanationfor these splits. Overall, the results of this study may partially address why there are more documentedcases of vowel mergers than vowel splits. Splits may be more likely to develop in certain contact settings that have been under-researched in the variationist sociolinguistics literature

Is Heritage Phonology Conservative?: Evidence from Toronto Heritage Cantonese

Some researchers and language teachers have observed that HL (Heritage Language) speakers sound “native-like” in their phonology (Polinsky and Kagan 2007) in contrast to their “incomplete acquisition” of morpho-syntactic features (Montrul 2008). Yet, these impressions of conservatism in phonology have largely been anecdotal. Only a handful of studies have specifically examined HL vowel systems using acoustic data (cf. Godson 2003 for Western Armenian; Chang et al. 2011 for Mandarin; Ronquest 2013 for Spanish). In this talk, I present data from a study of intergenerational (GEN 1 vs. GEN 2) vowel change in Toronto Heritage Cantonese to address the question of conservatism in HL phonology. Can we find evidence for conservatism through acoustic analysis of vowels in sociolinguistic interview data? The data examined comes from the Heritage Language Variation and Change (HLVC) in Toronto Project (Nagy 2011), which includes recorded and transcribed hour-long sociolinguistic interviews and responses to an Ethnic Orientation Questionnaire (EOQ). The F1 and F2 of 75 vowel tokens were measured and normalized across two phonetic contexts (pre-velar-coda and open-syllable) for each of four vowel categories (/i:/, /u:/, /ɛ:/, and /ɔ:/) from each of 17 speakers (1,020 vowel tokens). Rbrul (Johnson 2009) was used to run mixed effects models with phonetic context, generational background, sex, age, and Ethnic Orientation (EO) continuum scores (Nagy et al. 2014) as independent variables to model variation in the continuous dependent variables F1 and (in separate analyses) F2. This presentation will focus on the following results: (1) There is a significant lowering effect (higher F1) of /i:/ and /uː/ in pre-velar context (compared to open syllables) across the speech community (

Linguistic dominance, use, and proficiency as factors in heritage language sound change

Using vowel formant production data (in spontaneous speech) from Toronto Heritage Cantonese, this presentation addresses linguistic dominance, language use, and language proficiency as factors in the actuation of sound change in a heritage language setting. Results show second-generation speakers with lower Cantonese % Scores innovating a merger of the high round vowels /y/ and /u/ and a pre-nasal split in /ɛ/ (both English-influenced changes). Since all second-generation speakers examined are English-dominant, linguistic dominance alone cannot account for these results. Instead, language use and proficiency may be more influential factors in the actuation of sound change in a small language community