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A Comparative Study on Formosan Phonology: Paiwan and Budai Rukai

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A Comparative Study on Formosan Phonology: Paiwan and Budai Rukai Copyright by Chun-Mei Chen 2006 The Dissertation Committee for Chun-Mei Chen certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: A Comparative Study on Formosan Phonology: Paiwan and Budai Rukai Committee: ________________________________ Anthony C. Woodbury, Supervisor ________________________________ Megan Crowhurst ________________________________ Elizabeth Keating ________________________________ Scott Myers ________________________________ Harvey M. Sussman A Comparative Study on Formosan Phonology: Paiwan and Budai Rukai by Chun-Mei Chen, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2006 To my grandmother, with loving memory Acknowledgements The dissertation would not have been possible without many people. The first big thanks go to my supervisor, Tony Woodbury. I took his Field Methods in my first year. I was inspired by his approaches to field data and the prosody of an unknown language. My view toward indigenous languages has been broadened, and I have decided to be a fieldworker since early years of my study at UT Linguistics. His encouragement for my pilot project on Austronesian Phonology has made this dissertation possible. His sincere dedication to the indigenous languages has deeply inspired me. Tony has been such an inspiration that makes me leave the phonetics laboratory to collect the sounds in the field. By staying in the field, I have learned much more than sound patterns. I would never thank him enough for bringing me so many insightful comments and ceaseless intellectual support. He is always ahead of the trends in the field. I would like to express my deep gratitude to my committee members, Harvey Sussman, Scott Myers, Megan Crowhurst, and Elizabeth Keating. Dr. Sussman has been such a humorous and generous person that every student in his class loves him. I took his Speech Production & Speech Perception and Neurolinguistics, from which my view for sounds and brain has been sharpened. I have benefited a lot from his concise elucidation of sounds. Scott has taught me the logic for designing an experiment and the methods for empirical analysis. I have benefited a lot from his insightful comments on my draft. Megan has helped me always at the very right time, whenever I need relevant literature or papers for my conference presentation or dissertation writing. I would like to thank her for the insightful comments on my dissertation. Elizabeth Keating is a v linguistic anthropologist. She has offered me the methods for collecting natural discourse data in the field and the analysis of conversation and narrative. I would like to express my gratitude for her continuous concern for my dissertation progress. I owe many thanks to Dr. Björn Lindblom for his guidance of my studies of sounds from the beginning. He has been such a great phonetician from whom I have seen the simplest but the most beautiful pictures of sounds. He always came out with the most efficient and scientific solution for my complicated questions. He is not only a great researcher but also a mentor. The research project was funded by the dissertation fellowship from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange in McLean, Virginia, USA. The fieldwork and the smooth writing processes would not have been possible without the sufficient financial support from the foundation. I would also like to thank the Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, for hosting me as a Visiting Young Scholar for six months. I have gained a lot of research resources and the background knowledge of Formosan languages in the institute. I am indebted to Prof. Paul Li and Prof. Elizabeth Zeitoun. Elizabeth has read the earlier version of my draft and gave me comments. Her routine seminars have been great chances for me to catch up the pictures of Formosan languages. Prof. Paul Li has offered me support for field trips and much practical fieldwork experience. He has been such a great fieldworker I admire. His numerous fieldwork and contributions are amazing. I am also indebted to Prof. Shigeru Tsuchida, for his sharing with me his field notes on twenty Paiwan villages and his observation on sound change among the Paiwan villages. I would like to express my great appreciation for his mailing stacks of field notes from Japan to me. vi I would also like to thank the Phonetics Laboratory in Academia Sinica, Taipei, for the technical support of the spectrum graphs. In addition, the members of Formosan Archive in Academia Sinica, Kivi and Kala, have offered me much assistance during my stay. Kivi is a native speaker of Paiwan. She has built up the preliminary social network for my field trips to Southern Paiwan and Budai Rukai. Xian-Hui Tang also offered me judgments on Northern Paiwan data and the reconfirmation. Without their help, I would never have been able to collect the field data within a short period of time. My colleague Stacy Teng from Australian National University has been very helpful to me. She is an experienced fieldworker in Puyuma, another Formosan language. I benefited a lot from her sharing with me the views for field data and the useful tools for dissertation writing. Earlier versions of the field reports were presented at the 11th, 12th and 13en meetings of Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA 11, AFLA 12 and AFLA 13), the Sounds Group at UT Linguistics, and Academia Sinica. I would like to thank the participants who gave me insightful comments. All errors and misrepresentations are of course my own responsibility. I am deeply indebted to the informants in the Paiwan and the Budai Rukai tribes. I would like to thank the people in the Piuma Paiwan Village for being supportive and helpful towards me. Special thanks go to Cegaw, who made my first field trip possible. Village head Mr. Kong has been very enthusiastic about my fieldwork. He has screened appropriate informants for me and shown continuous concern for my progress. I would like to thank all the informants who have participated in my dissertation project for spending time with me, offering me their sounds and verbal arts, and making me learn more about their vii languages. They have treated me more like a friend than a fieldworker. Because of them, making field trips has been a joyful event. I would like to thank Wen-Hua Teng and Mary Ho at UT Asian Studies for offering me three years of TAship for my study at UT. Wen-Hua Teng has been the most generous and considerate boss that I have ever known. I am grateful for her continuous concern for my academic studies, dissertation writing, future career, and personal life. I would also like to thank my colleagues at UT Asian Studies, Shaohua Guo, Li Yang, and Ying Xiao, for their help and concern. I am also grateful to my wonderful linguistics colleagues, Cheng-Fu Chen and Fei Ren, also members of “Chinese gossip group”, for their moral support and sharing. My life at UT would have been extremely monotonous without them. I want to thank Henrietta Yang, Hsi-Yao Su, and Jiun-Shiung Wu, who are ex-fellows at UT Linguistics, for sharing their academic experience with me. I would like to thank Hye-Yoon Chung for her moral support. I also want to thank Sadaf Munshi, for her help in my early writing of IRB proposal. I would like to thank Peggy Hsieh, for being my neighbor for three years. Thanks to all the other friends who have helped me, too many names to name. Last but not least, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my family. My parents Yu-Chen Wu and Ching-An Chen have been so supportive all my life that I would never thank them enough. My sisters Yi-Jing Chen and Mei-Chao Chen, brother Yan-Ming Chen and brother-in-law Jeng-Farn Lee have been very understanding during my writing of dissertation. Many thanks go to them for bringing so much moral support and entertainment to me. Finally, I would like to express my greatest appreciation to my husband, Ying-Chiuan Lin, for holding me ups and downs, for his inexhaustible support and love. I would not have done this without him. viii A Comparative Study on Formosan Phonology: Paiwan and Budai Rukai Publication No. ____________ Chun-Mei Chen, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2006 Supervisor: Anthony C. Woodbury This study provides a detailed description and analysis of phonology of two Formosan languages and further compares the phonological constraints and prosodic structures in the languages. Formosan languages, nearly half of which have become extinct in the past two centuries, are the aboriginal languages of Taiwan. They belong to the Austronesian language family. Paiwan and Budai Rukai were selected for their geographical distribution and genetic classification. None of the existing field reports bear on both systemic phonetics and phonology of Formosan languages. Accentual patterns from Formosan languages have become essential for the reconstruction of Proto-Austronesian stress. In this ix study, segmental phonology, phonetic representations of consonants and vowels, sound change, and prosodic structures such as word stress, phrasal stress, word- level pitch accent, and sentence-level intonation of Paiwan and Budai Rukai were documented, analyzed, constructed and compared. The distribution of pitch accent in imperative construction and face-to-face interaction has shown the significance of prosody in Paiwan. Boundary tones are important indices for the syntactic types of sentences in Paiwan. On the other hand, vowel length is phonemic, and syllable weight does affect the assignment of stress in Budai Rukai.
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