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Syllable Fusion in Hong Kong Cantonese Connected Speech

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Syllable Fusion in Hong Kong Cantonese Connected Speech SYLLABLE FUSION IN HONG KONG CANTONESE CONNECTED SPEECH DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Wai Yi Peggy Wong, B.A., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 2006 Dissertation Committee: Professor Mary E Beckman, Adviser _________________________ Professor Marjorie K M Chan, Co-Adviser Adviser Professor Chris Brew _________________________ Co-Adviser Linguistics Graduate Program © Copyright by Wai Yi Peggy Wong 2006 ABSTRACT This dissertation is about “syllable fusion” in Hong Kong Cantonese. Syllable fusion is a connected-speech phenomenon whereby boundaries between syllables are blurred together in a way that suggests an intermediate level of grouping between the syllable and the larger intonational phrase. Previous studies of this phenomenon have focused on extreme cases — i.e. whole segments (consonants and/or vowels) are deleted at the relevant syllable boundary. By contrast, in this dissertation, “syllable fusion” refers to a variety of changes affecting a sequence of two syllables that range along a continuum from “mild” to “extreme” blending together of the syllables. Less extreme changes include assimilation, consonant lenition and so on, any substantial weakening or effective deletion of the oral gesture(s) of the segment(s) contiguous to the syllable boundary, and the sometimes attendant resyllabifications that create “fused forms”. More extreme fusion can simplify contour tones and “merge” the qualities of vowels that would be separated by an onset or coda consonant at more “normal” degrees of disjuncture between words. ii The idea that motivates the experiments described in this dissertation is that the occurrence of syllable fusion marks prosodic grouping at the level of the “foot”, a phonological constituent which has been proposed to account for prosodic phenomena such as the process of tone sandhi and neutral tone in other varieties of Chinese. If syllable fusion marks the grouping together of syllables into feet, there must be factors similar to the factors that influence the occurrence of tone sandhi and neutral tone in other varieties of Chinese that influence the occurrence and the degree of syllable fusion. Discovering these factors would allow us to understand the “foot” structure for Cantonese. Five factors were identified and tested in this dissertation: speech rate, word frequency, word length, morphosyntactic relationship, and prosodic position of words. Three experiments were run to test the five factors. Results showed main effects for all five factors and interaction effects among them. Unifying these factors, this dissertation proposed that the “foot” be used as an intermediate level of constituent in the Cantonese prosodic hierarchy that captures the phenomenon of syllable fusion in Cantonese. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I always think of a piece of research work as an orchestra — many people offered various kinds of help at various times that shaped the final piece. This dissertation is no exception. I would not have been able to bring this dissertation to a completion all by myself without the help of many, many people, who lovingly offered their prayers, advice, support, encouragement, and actual help. Not only did they offer help, they offered help at the right timing, which could mean inconveniencing their own schedules and sacrificing their own preferences. These acts of love have added much joy and peace to the long process of dissertating. This orchestra will resound in my heart. My deepest gratitude goes to my adviser, Mary Beckman, who has been a great inspiration in many aspects in this dissertation and a great mentor personally. From the general direction to the finer details of the dissertation, she has given to me a lot of insightful guidance and help. I greatly appreciate her efficiency and patience in reading and correcting my drafts. It was through her corrections that I learned a great deal about writing. Mary always insists on giving me her feedback on time so that I could revise my draft accordingly, even when she was swarmed with work and under time pressure, and iv even that meant many hours of sleep needed to be sacrificed. She also goes out of her way to deliberately make an extra trip to come back to Columbus from Georgia for my dissertation defense, even this is her off-quarter. Thanks so much again for all you did, Mary! I am also very grateful to Margie Chan, my co-adviser, and Chris Brew, for their generous support and patience, especially in the final stage of dissertating. Their “OK’s” had become such a comforting word during the times when I was working hard on giving them my dissertation draft, but kept needing to delay. Margie and Chris, thanks again for being so understanding and patient in waiting for my draft, but so efficient in reading it! Margie, thanks also for the various get-togethers at your place, which will become memory of my good old days in Columbus! I would also like to thank the following people and institutions regarding the use of corpora in this dissertation. Drs. Sam Po Law and Man Tak Leung in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences at the University of Hong Kong let me use the Hong Kong Cantonese Adult Language Corpus (HKCAC) for this dissertation. Dr. Shui Duen Chan in the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University let me use the Segmentation Corpus and the algorithm and program that did the word segmentation. Mr. Him Man Hui at the Chinese Language Centre at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University gave me instructions about how to use the segmentation program. (The development of the Segmentation Corpus was supported by a grant from v the University Grants Committee of Hong Kong to Prof. Y.-S. Cheung, Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The corpus is maintained by Dr. S.-D. Chan.) My thanks also go to the Graduate School of the Ohio State University. This dissertation was partly supported by an Alumni Grant for Graduate Research and Scholarship (AGGRS) that was granted to me in 2004. The tasks of reformatting, word segmentation and tagging of the HKCAC, morphosyntactic analysis of the candidate test words, and the actual running of Experiment III all needed to be done one after another (i.e. the sequence of tasks could not be changed), and they needed to be done during the two and a half months that I was in Hong Kong. Thus, the completion of the tasks was under time pressure. Thankfully, help was given one after another at just the right time. I am deeply grateful to all the following people. After reformatting the HKCAC, I was in need of a person who could quickly write a program to map the segmented orthographic transcription onto the phonetic transcription of the HKCAC. I thank Mr. Dicky Chan for his proficiency and efficiency in getting the work done! Mr. Samuel P. M. Cheung, Mr. Him Man Hui, and Dr. Alan Yu were kind and brave enough to agree to do the task of morphosyntactic annotation for me, which involved more than 7,000 words! Thank you all so much! vi Dr. Cathy Wong let me use the Speech Laboratory in the English Department at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University to run subjects for Experiment III in this dissertation. Ms. Cherry Ng was very helpful in many technical aspects concerning the lab equipment and setting. Many brothers and sisters at the Joshua Fellowship at the Columbus Chinese Christian Church helped me find subjects to participate in my experiment. I would like to thank them all and thank all of my participants who responded so promptly. Just within a few days, about 29 subjects were lined up and I could finish running them all in just about one week! (The next day after finished running the experiment was the day when I had to head back to Columbus.) I also thank my adviser, Mary Beckman, and my fellow graduate student Kyuchul Yoon for their help on writing of Praat scripts, which speeded up the process of extracting Praat textgrids and the subsequent analysis of data. In terms of doing statistical analysis, I am thankful to Ms. Zhenhuan Cui, a Ph.D. candidate in the Statistics Department at the Ohio State University and my old neighbor when I was living in the dorm. When I was looking for help, her name just popped up in my head. And it so happened that her research focuses on logistic regression. She had given me valuable advice for the statistical analysis in this dissertation. I would also like to thank my team-mates in the paidologos (pdlg) project, including, Mary Beckman, Jan Edwards, Junko Davis, Eunjong Kong, Fangfang Li, Laura Slocum vii and Asimina Syrika. I thank Mary and Jan for being flexible and considerate in letting me focus on finishing the dissertation first and then make up the work for the project after this dissertation was completed. I also thank the help that my team-mates generously offered to lighten my workload for the project so that I could be more focused on working on this dissertation. There are many others who were always behind the scene offering invisible but indispensable help. I am thankful for the continuous prayers and the words of encouragement of all those who have been praying for me. They include my fellow grads and alumni in the Linguistics Department: Wes Collins, Hope Dawson, Markus Dickinson, Janice Fon, Anne Hoffman, Crystal Nakatsu, Anton Rytting, Elizabeth Smith, and Lei Xu; all my brothers and sisters at the Joshua Fellowship, the Cantonese Family Fellowship and the Foundation College Fellowship at the Columbus Chinese Christian Church; Pastor J.
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