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- The Role of Language-Specific Phonetics in Contour Tone Distribution: Instrumental Studies
- Instrumental Studies
- Results
ProspectusThe other dimension on which the direct, the traditional positional faithfulness, and the representational approaches can be differentiated is the comparability of different privileged positions. As I have discussed in Chapter 1, for one particular language, it is possible that there are multiple positions that provide better docking sites for contour tones than others. Which position surfaces as a better position and what properties the better position has can shed light on which theory is the more appropriate one. The major goal of Chapter 5 is to test the predictions of the different approaches by a series of phonetic studies on relevant languages and to argue again that the direct approach makes the most restrictive, yet most accurate predictions. And putting it in a broader perspective, the chapter also aims to sort out the two possible interpretations under the contrast-specificity hypothesis of positional prominence shown in (0), i.e., whether phonology is tuned to language-specific phonetics, or not. If the answer to the question is ‘no’, then the speakers’ task is only to identify privileged positions for the contrast in question. Under this interpretation, phonology is still to a large extent autonomous, since it is sufficient to encode only the ‘structural’ properties of the tone-bearing units, such as ‘[+long] in word-final position’, in phonology. There is no need to refer to phonetic categories such as CDC(CVV-final). If the answer to the question is ‘yes’, then the speakers not only have to identify privileged positions, but also have to keep track of the language-specific relative power of the conditioning factors. Under this interpretation, phonology is more phonetically controlled.
The Role of Language-Specific Phonetics in Contour Tone Distribution: Instrumental StudiesIdentifying the LanguagesThis chapter addresses the different predictions between the direct approach and the structure-only approaches (traditional positional faithfulness and moraic) about the comparability in contour tone bearing between multiple positions, all of which induce a greater CCONTOUR value. The predictions of the approaches on this point have been laid out in §3.3. They are recapitulated in (0). (0) Within a language, when there are multiple factors that induce greater CCONTOUR values: a. The direct approach: their contour tone licensing ability corresponds to the degree of enhancement of CCONTOUR: the greater the CCONTOUR value, the greater the contour tone licensing ability. b. The traditional positional faithfulness approach: any one of the factors may turn out to be the best contour tone licensor, regardless of the degree of phonetic advantage the factor induces as compared to the other factors. c. The moraic approach: their contour tone licensing ability is determined by whether they increase the mora count of the syllable: the greater the number of moras the syllable has, the greater its contour tone bearing ability. The issue is addressed by instrumental studies of duration in languages with coexisting durational properties that fit the description of P1 and P2 in §3.3, i.e., two distinct properties of a syllable that can both induce lengthening of the sonorous portion of the rime. To recapitulate the gist of the argument, if we find languages in which the privileged factor for contour bearing is P1 despite the fact that syllables endowed with P1 but not P2 have a shorter sonorous rime than those endowed with P2 but not P1, then we must conclude that one of the structure-only approaches is the correct one—we opt for the moraic approach if the difference in contour bearing between P1 and P2 can be captured by moraic terms; and we opt for the traditional faithfulness approach if not. If, on the other hand, the privileged factor is always the one that induces a greater lengthening effect, or in case of equal lengthening, a longer vocalic component, then we conclude that the direct approach is superior, since it makes exactly this prediction and no others. Let me first identify the relevant languages. The first type of languages involves stress and final position in a prosodic domain. A language with non-final stress fits the scenario described above: if we take stress to be P1 and final position to be P2, the language in question has both syllables with only property P1—the stressed syllables, and syllables with only property P2—the final syllables. The clearest cases of this sort are some of the Southern Bantu languages, which have penultimate stress. Specifically, languages which have no vowel length contrasts and restrict their contour distribution solely on the basis of stress are the most relevant. Xhosa is a such a language (Lanham 1958, 1963, Jordan 1966). In many Northern Chinese dialects (e.g., Beijing Chinese), all syllables are equally stressed, but some monosyllabic reduplicative morphemes and functional words can be destressed, and they can occur word-finally. Contour tones are usually restricted to stressed syllables in these languages. They constitute a special case of stress interacting with position: like Xhosa, they can have a stressed penult and an unstressed ultima in a word; but unlike Xhosa in which stress is the marked property of a syllable, stresslessness is the marked property in these languages. The second pair is a pair of segmental properties. Both contrastive vowel length and sonorancy of the coda consonant influence the sonorous duration of the rime cross-linguistically. For coda sonorancy, this is so not only because a sonorant coda contributes to the sonorous rime duration while an obstruent coda does not, but also because obstruent codas may shorten the duration of the preceding vowel, as in many Chinese dialects. If we take the [+long] feature of the vowel as property P1 and the [+son] feature of the coda consonant as property P2, then in a language with both vowel length and coda sonorancy contrasts, syllable CVVO has property P1 but not P2, and syllable CVR has property P2 but not P1. Among the languages that fit this description, Standard Thai (Abramson 1962, Gandour 1974) and Cantonese (Kao 1971, Li et al. 1995, Gordon 1998) allow fewer contour tones on CVVO than on CVR, while Navajo (Hoijer 1974, Kari 1976, Young and Morgan 1987, 1992) and Somali (Saeed 1982, 1993) do not allow contour tones on CVR, but do on CVVO. Of all the combinations of factors influencing duration, these two pairs are the most commonly attested that fit the scenario which can differentiate the approaches under consideration: two durational factors cross-classify, yielding syllables that have either properties but not both; and the contour restrictions are based on one of these two factors. Five languages that are representative of the scenarios laid out above, and for which instrumental data are accessible or obtainable, were included in a series of phonetic studies: Xhosa, Beijing Chinese, Standard Thai, Navajo, and Somali. The data sources for these languages are summarized in (0). All data collection was done in the sound booth of the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory. All data analyses were carried out on Kay Elemetrics CSL. The sampling rate for digitization was 20kHz. Spectrograms were made for the speech materials and duration was measured from the spectrograms. In the next section, I lay out the specific hypotheses and document the phonetic results for these five languages. Furthermore, I also discuss the phonetic results on Cantonese in Gordon (1998, 1999a), a language which also fits the criteria above.
There is another type of languages that potentially distinguishes the direct approach from the other approaches. These languages have a vowel length contrast, yet contour tones are restricted to word- or utterance-final syllables irrespective of their vowel length. Therefore, the situation here is that the final syllable with a short vowel can carry a contour tone, while non-final syllables with a long vowel cannot. There are two languages of this sort in my survey: Lama (Kenstowicz, Nikiema and Ourso 1988, Ourso 1989, Kenstowicz 1994) and KOnni (Cahill 1999). But I do not have any phonetic data on these languages. For further discussion of these languages, see §5.3. Instrumental StudiesXhosaHypothesis and MaterialsThe data pattern of Xhosa has already been discussed in §4.3.2.2. To recapitulate: Xhosa has penultimate word stress, vowel length is non-contrastive except in a few grammatical morphemes, and all syllables are open.19 There are three tones in Xhosa: High (H), Low (L), and Fall (H°L). There are no distributional restrictions for H and L, but H°L is generally restricted to the penult of a content word. A few monosyllabic grammatical prefixes and suffixes can also bear the H°L tone, and they do not necessarily occur in the penultimate position of a word. But the vowel in these morphemes is lengthened. In an utterance, especially when spoken quickly, some words lose their penultimate stress, creating the tonal alternation H°LH (Lanham 1958, 1963, Jordan 1966). See §4.3.2.2 for examples. The focus here is the fact that H°L is restricted to the penult of a word. The two relevant durational factors here are stress and final position. The two types of syllables directly of interest are the penult and the ultima. The penult is subject to lengthening by virtue of stress, but not by virtue of being at a prosodic boundary. The opposite is true for the ultima. Given that all syllables are open, the vowel alone constitutes the sonorous portion of the rime. I lay out the hypothesis on vowel duration in Xhosa according to the direct approach in (0).
The penult has a longer vowel duration than the ultima. The phonetic data for Xhosa were extracted from a 45-minute analog tape in the UCLA Language Archive. It consists mainly of trisyllabic or tetrasyllabic words read in isolation by one female speaker of Xhosa. Each word has two repetitions. All words extracted for digitization and measurements were trisyllabic. All target syllables—ultima, penult or initial—were open with a level-toned /a/ as the nucleus. The matched vowel quality ensures that any durational differences detected are not induced by vowel quality differences. Level-toned syllables were used to ensure that any durational advantage of the penultimate syllable, if detected, is due to the position per se, not the falling contour it carries, thus avoiding circularity. Fifty-four words were used for the final target, thirty-four for the penultimate target, and forty-four for the initial target. The complete word list is given in (0). In the word list, H is marked with an acute accent / !/, Low is marked with a grave accent / ~/, and H°L is marked with / $/. The occasional rising tone, marked with / ‹/, is probably due to morpheme concatenation. (0) Xhosa word list:
ResultsThe mean duration of /a/ for the three positions is shown in the bar plot in (0). The error bars indicate one standard deviation. The /a/ in the penult has a mean duration of 212ms. The /a/ in the ultima has a considerably shorter duration—132ms. The /a/ in the initial position is yet shorter—99ms. One way ANOVA shows that the effect of position is highly significant (F(2,131)=242.98, p<0.0001). Fisher’s PLSD post-hoc tests show that all pairs of comparison—penult vs. ultima, penult vs. initial, and ultima vs. initial—have a significant effect at the level of p<0.0001. Given the limited number of speakers available to Xhosa and the rest of the languages included in the studies, I only ran statistical tests that treat subjects as a fixed effect, and therefore these tests only allow inference about the subjects included in the study. This is the inevitable limitation of any study that only has a small number of subjects (de Jong and Zawaydeh 1999, Max and Onghena 1999). Any significant effects revealed here must be subject to further tests on data acquired from more subjects which treats the subjects and subjects alone as the independent variable. (0) Xhosa vowel duration (ms): 
The duration results clearly show that although both stress and final position induce lengthening effect of the syllable nucleus, the effect of stress is significantly greater. One possible objection to this claim is that in the word list, most of the penultimate /a/’s have a H tone, while most of the final /a/’s have a L tone. Therefore the difference between penult and ultima could be due to this tonal difference. I calculated the mean duration of H-toned and L-toned /a/’s in these two positions separately. The results are summarized in (0). As can be seen, although for the penult, the H-toned vowels are longer than the L-toned vowels, the opposite is true for the ultima. Moreover, the durational differences caused by the tonal difference is very small compared to those caused by the positional difference. Thus we can safely conclude that the penult has a significantly longer nucleus than the ultima. (0) Duration of H-tone and L-tone vowels in Xhosa:
The phonetic hypothesis in (0) is therefore supported by the experimental results: in Xhosa, the lengthening effect induced by stress is greater than that induced by final position. Since it is exactly stress that defines the contour restriction in Xhosa, I conclude that the data in Xhosa are consistent with the direct approach. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 3.01 Mb. Share with your friends:
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