On the proper treatment of tonal chain-shifts

Capturing, 2015

This paper discusses tonal chain shifts in Taiwanese from the perspective of comparative markedness. The tone circle in this language considers old tone markedness violations more serious than new tone markedness violations. This is referred to as "anti-grandfathering effects," which motivate the circular chain shifts. This paper also argues for local conjunction to work with comparative markedness; new tone markedness constraints are locally conjoined with tone feature faithfulness constraints. The WOW (worst-of-the-worst) effects provide a direction for the tone circle. The employment of comparative markedness offers a fresh angle from which to examine tone sandhi across Chinese dialects, and makes antifaithfulness and contrast preservation dispensable.

2005

2016

An acoustically-based description is given of the isolation tones and right-dominant tone sandhi in disyllabic words of a male speaker of the Chinese Oūjiāng 甌江 Wu吳 dialect of Wencheng 文成. His seven isolation tones show typical Wu complexity, comprising two mid-level, two rising, two falling-rising and one depressed level pitch shapes. Typical too is his three-way voicing contrast in syllable-Onset stops. However, the typical Wu relationship between tonal register and phonemic Onset voicing is shown to be disrupted, Onset voicing no longer correlating with tonal pitch height. The word-final tones in sandhi are shown to be straightforwardly related, phonologically and phonetically, to the isolation tones, with biuniqueness preserved. The realization of the word-initial tones in sandhi, on the other hand, involves complex mergers conditioned by largely non-phonetic factors related to historical tone categories, resulting in five extra sandhi tones that do not occur in isolation. It is...

Phonology, 2007

Proceedings of Interspeech, 2010

This study investigates the mechanism of tonal contraction when a disyllabic unit is merged into a monosyllabic at fast speech rate in Taiwan Mandarin. Various degrees of contraction of bi-tonal sequences were elicited by manipulating speech rates. Functional Data Analysis was performed to compare trajectories of F0 and velocity in the contracted and non-contracted syllables. Preliminary results show that speakers always make an effort to produce the original tones, even in cases of extreme degrees of reduction. This finding militates against phonology-based accounts like the Edge-in model, according to which contraction is a process of deleting adjacent tonemes while leaving the non-adjacent tonemes intact.

UST Working Papers in Linguistics, 2005

Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics, 2006

It has long been noted that phonological patterning is influenced by phonetic factors. But phonologists diverge on whether phonetic motivations take effect in synchronic or diachronic phonology. This article aims to tease apart the two theories by investigating native Mandarin speakers' applications of two tone sandhi processes to novel words: the phonetically motivated contour reduction 213 21/__T (T 213) and the neutralizing 213 35/__213 whose phonetic motivations are less clear. Twenty Mandarin subjects were asked to produce two monosyllables they heard as disyllabic words. Five groups of disyllabic words were tested: AO-AO (AO=actual occurring morpheme) where the disyllable is also a real word, AO-AO' where the disyllable is nonoccurring, AO-AG (AG=accidental gap in Mandarin lexicon -legal syllable and tone but non-existent combination), AG-AO, and AG-AG. The first syllable is always 213, and the second syllable has one of the four tones in Mandarin. Results show that speakers apply the phonetically more natural 213 21 sandhi more quickly and with greater accuracy than the 213 35 sandhi. Theoretically, the study supports the direct relevance of phonetics to synchronic phonology by showing that there is a psychological advantage to phonetically natural patterns. Methodologically, it complements existing research paradigms that test the nature of the phonology-phonetics relationship, e.g., the study of phonological acquisition and the artificial language paradigm; when extended to other Chinese dialects, it can also provide insights into the long-standing mystery of how Chinese speakers internalise complicated tone sandhi patterns that sometimes involve opacity, near-neutralization, and syntactic dependency.

Linguistics Vanguard

We conducted a perception experiment in the field to examine the synchronic consequences of a tonal split in Risiangku Tamang (Tibeto-Burman). Proto-Tamang was a two-tone language with three series of plosives and two series of continuants. The merger of its continuants provoked a split of the original two tones into four, two high and two low, which combine pitch and phonation features. The quasi-merger of the voiced and voiceless plosives left sporadic remnants of initial plosive voicing in low tone syllables. A previous production study has shown that speakers use pitch and phonation features concomitantly to distinguish high from low tones, while producing initial plosive voicing only marginally with low tones. The present perception study establishes the preeminence of the pitch cue, but also confirms the effective use of the two older cues in tone identification. An apparent-time analysis shows the phonation cue to be less used by younger speakers, in keeping with the historic...

This paper presents an optimality theory account of stress-dependent tone assignment in Chinese speakers’ Colloquial Singaporean English (CSE). Disagreements between previous transcriptions are reconciled, showing that speakers use low, mid, high and unspecified tone. Modifications to De Lacy’s proposal on the stress-tone relationship and the Bantu constraint PLATEAU are proposed in order to cope with CSE’s tonal inventory.

Issues of Teaching Vietnamese and Studying Vietnam in the Today’s World, 2019

The purpose of this study surveys the tonal system in Vietnamese, Taiwanese and Chinese from the perspective of contrastive analysis. When Taiwanese speakers are learning Vietnamese language, they should pay more attention to Ngã tone and Sắc tone. Ngã tone does not exists in Taiwanese or Chinese. This is the most difficult tone for learners from Taiwan and China. Nga tone began at the level of 44 semitones and rose to the same top of sac tone. Its trajectory showed a characteristic break in the voicing at about 225 msec (about half of the total duration) into the syllable. Its angle between falling and rising parts of nga tone is smaller than that of Hoi tone. Sắc tone can be divided into two categories according to its final consonants. When sac tones do not end up with alphabet letters p, t, c, or ch finals, their shapes are similar to tone 9 (only occurs in Taiwanese tone sandhi conditions) in Taiwanese, or tone 2 in Beijin Mandarin. When sac tones end up with p, t, c, or ch, they are similar to Taiwanese tone 8. In addition, it is partially similar to the initial part of the high falling pitch of tone 4 in both Taiwan Mandarin and Beijing Mandarin.