The Effect of Prosody and Dialectal Difference on Syllable-final Nasal Mergers in Taiwan Mandarin Spontaneous Speech
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Lei, Hsiang-Yu
Abstract
This study reports the performance of syllable-final nasal mergers in Taiwan Mandarin spontaneous speech via a corpus. Past studies showed debates on merging direction, robustness, and cause, but the results was stilled puzzling. Recent findings on this issue suggested that there exists potential dialectal difference between the North and the South. In this study, the merger among the three representative regions, Taipei, Taichung, and Kaohsiung, were investigated to discover details of dialectal difference. With the usage of spontaneous speech materials, prosodic effects on merger application were also examined. The study extracted recordings of twenty-four Taiwan Mandarin-Min bilingual speakers (equally divided among regions and between genders), and each contributed around 30-minute-long speech data. Effects of two social factors (region and gender) and two linguistic factors (prosodic prominence and boundary) were observed. Results showed that speakers in Taipei took the lead in applying /in/→[iŋ], followed by Kaohsiung, and then Taichung. The /iŋ/→[in] merger was dominated by both Taichung and Kaohsiung speakers, but was also found in one Taipei female speaker. The post-/i/ nasal-mergers were generally in competition with each other. The /əŋ/→[ən] merger was applied by speakers of all dialects. The results across regions suggested that /in/→[iŋ] were spread more through the social space of Wave Theory, whereas /iŋ/→[in] diffused more through the geographic space. For the effect of linguistic factors, prosodic boundary facilitated all three mergers, while the effect of prosodic prominence was relatively complicated and was only found in Kaohsiung speakers: a strengthening effect for both post-/i/ nasal mergers, but a restraining effect for /əŋ/→[ən]. The effect of prosodic prominence seemed to interact with sociolinguistic and typological markedness, which is related to rule progression and connotation.
Subjects
syllable-final nasal merger
corpus study
spontaneous speech
dialectal difference
prosodic prominence
prosodic boundary
Type
thesis
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