THESIS
2016
xviii, 127 pages : illustrations ; 30 cm
Abstract
Uncovering the magnitude and range of lawful variation in speech ranks as one of the
major goals of linguistic science in general and instrumental phonetics in particular
(Ohala 2003, 670). However, the wealth of phonetic variation revealed by instrumental
phonetics presents linguists with an as-yet-unsolved problem: how should this variation
be understood in phonology? Over the past few decades, as the study of variation has
become increasingly important in phonology (Coetzee & Pater, 2011; Kügler, Féry, &
Vijver, 2009), the explanatory power of experimental methods to address these issues
has been well established (Hayes, 1999; Kingston, 2007; Ohala, 1974, 1984;
Pierrehumbert, 2000a). The present study contributes to this body of research with a
case study on the tonal variat...[
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Uncovering the magnitude and range of lawful variation in speech ranks as one of the
major goals of linguistic science in general and instrumental phonetics in particular
(Ohala 2003, 670). However, the wealth of phonetic variation revealed by instrumental
phonetics presents linguists with an as-yet-unsolved problem: how should this variation
be understood in phonology? Over the past few decades, as the study of variation has
become increasingly important in phonology (Coetzee & Pater, 2011; Kügler, Féry, &
Vijver, 2009), the explanatory power of experimental methods to address these issues
has been well established (Hayes, 1999; Kingston, 2007; Ohala, 1974, 1984;
Pierrehumbert, 2000a). The present study contributes to this body of research with a
case study on the tonal variation of Jianyang Min Chinese and related phonological
issues.
First, I propose a new model that represents tonal variation and quantifies its external
and internal dispersion. This "tonal acoustic space" model has three advantages over
earlier acoustic models on tones. First, this model is able to show the relative location of
each tone as well as the distance between any two tones. Second, the range and density
of each tone can be shown by plotting all the tokens. Third, by measuring external and
internal dispersion values, the model provides a quantitative way to test the effect of
adaptive dispersion (Liljencrants & Lindblom, 1972).
Second, I present a detailed description of tonal variation in Jianyang Min Chinese, a
'dense' tone system with eight tones. I present two case studies conducted on Jianyang
Min using both experiment and corpus methods. Chapter 5 reports on a controlled
experiment of sentence prosodic variation; Chapter 6 uses a lexical corpus of Jianyang
to investigate word positional variation. The goal of these two studies is to separate and
compare the effects of sentence prosody and word position on tonal variation.
Finally, the theoretical implications of the empirical data from Jianyang Min tonal
variation are summarized. The results of these studies show that the predictions of
derivational phonology do not hold for empirical data drawn from Jianyang tonal
variation. Analysis of external dispersion values provide evidence for the role that
perceptual distinctiveness plays in shaping the tonal variation. To deal with these
findings, I propose an exemplar-based Tonal Acoustic Space representation of Jianyang
Min tones, which is radically different from earlier reductionist tonal representations. I
also show how the "Tonal Acoustic Space" model can be applied to and benefit
studies of tonal evolution and cross-language tonal comparison.
Keyword Northern Min, tone, quantitative model, adaptive dispersion, emergent
phonology
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