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Functional Load, Token Frequency, and Contact-Induced Change in Toronto Heritage Cantonese Vowels

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Functional Load, Token Frequency, and Contact-Induced Change in Toronto Heritage Cantonese Vowels St. Catherine University From the SelectedWorks of Holman Tse, PhD January 2, 2020 Functional load, token frequency, and contact- induced change in Toronto Heritage Cantonese vowels Holman Tse, St. Catherine University Creative CommonThis sL wicorke nis sliceensed under a Creative Commons CC_BY-NC-ND International License. Available at: https://works.bepress.com/holman-tse/8/ Functional load, token frequency, and contact-induced change in Toronto Heritage Cantonese vowels Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting January 2, 2020 New Orleans, LA Holman Tse, PhD Dept. of English and International HERITAGE LANGUAGE VARIATION AND CHANGE IN TORONTO Languages HTTP://PROJECTS.CHASS.UTORONTO.CA/NGN/HLVC St. Paul, MN 55105 [email protected] https://holmantse.github.io/ Introduction: Heritage Languages • “Phonetics and phonology remain among the least understood properties of heritage languages” (Polinsky 2018: 162) • Defined as “culturally or ethnolinguistically minority languages that develop in a bilingual setting where another sociopolitically majority language is spoken” (Montrul 2015:2) • Ex: Cantonese is a minority language in Toronto, Canada where English is the sociopolitically majority language • Presentation focus: • Vowel production among Toronto Heritage Cantonese speakers • Can functional load account for which vowels are more susceptible to loss of contrast (merger)? • /y/ (high front round) ~ /u/ (high back round)? • ex: [kyn35] 捲 ‘roll’ vs. [kun35] 官 ‘public building’ • /a/ (low central) ~ /ɔ/ (open ‘o’)? • Ex: [sa55] 沙 ‘sand’ vs. [sɔ55] 梳 ‘comb’ Previous Research on Heritage Speaker Vowels • Examples of previously investigated Languages • Western Armenian (Godson 2004) • Korean (Baker & Trofimovich 2005) • Arabic (Saadah 2011) • Mandarin (Chang et al. 2011, Yang 2014) • Spanish (Ronquest 2013) • Cantonese (Tse 2016a, 2016b) • Generally show maintenance of baseline vowel distinctions in each heritage language examined • Some low-level phonetic differences (ex: vowel shifting) observed but none lead to mergers or loss of distinctions • May have to do with access to two distinct phonological systems among early bilinguals (Polinsky 2018) A counter example? • Evidence of /y/ (high front round) and /u/ (high back round) merger for a subset of Toronto Heritage Cantonese speakers (Tse 2019a) 1. Why this subset of speakers? • Speakers with lower proficiency proxy scores more likely to merge (Tse 2019a) 2. Why /y/ and /u/ and not other vowel pairs such as /a/ vs. /ɔ/? • Proposal: Functional load differences mediated by contact with English PRESENTATION FOCUS Contact-induced Merger of /y/ ~ /u/? Cantonese Tense Vowels Toronto English Vowel System ????????? Cantonese has two high round tense vowels English has only one high round tense vowel (phonetically fronted) Does English influence on Cantonese mean change towards loss of /y/ vs. /u/ contrast? 5 Contact-induced Merger of /a/ ~ /ɔ/? Cantonese Vowel System Toronto English Vowel System ????????? Cantonese has /a/ ~ /ɔ/ contrast LOT /ɑ/ = THOUGHT /ɔ/ Does English influence on Cantonese mean change towards loss of /ɔ/ ~ /a/? 6 Is it because of functional load differences? • Functional load: “the idea that change in a system of phonemes is related to their role in information transmission” (Wedel et al 2013) • Three ways in which functional load can be operationalized 1. Number of minimal pairs distinguishing two phonemes THIS PRESENTATION 2. Lexical frequency of each phoneme 3. System entropy (change in the probabilistic in occurrence of minimal pairs and of each phoneme before and after a given merger) • Thus, fewer minimal pairs, lower lexical frequency, and lower change in system entropy favor phonemic mergers because of less information loss The Data • HLVC (Heritage Language Variation and Change) Project Corpus (Nagy 2011) • Digital recordings (.wav) of: 1. hour-long sociolinguistic interviews (spontaneous speech sample) 2. Ethnic Orientation Questionnaire responses 3. picture naming task responses • Vowel tokens measured for F1/F2 from all three sets of recordings • Lexical frequency information based on occurrence in interviews HERITAGE LANGUAGE VARIATION AND CHANGE IN TORONTO HTTP://PROJECTS.CHASS.UTORONTO.CA/NGN/HLVC 8 Speakers Analyzed (n = 32) Toronto (Heritage Group) Hong Kong (Homeland) Generation 1 (GEN 1) Generation 2 (GEN 2) Description Arrived in Canada as Grew up in Toronto, Lifelong Hong Kong residents adults, have lived in English-dominant bilinguals Toronto at least 20 years Dominant Cantonese English Cantonese language Age range 46-87 20-44 16-77 Total speakers n = 12 n = 12 n = 8 analyzed Hong Kong speakers included to strengthen/weaken contact-based explanations Thus, if inter-generational change is observed, is the same change observed in Hong Kong Cantonese? • If yes, contact explanation weakened • If no, contact explanation strengthened Data Processing • Prosodylab aligner (Gorman et al 2011) and Praat script used to obtain midpoint F1 and F2 of all usable tokens of 11 contrastive monophthongs (to create general vowel space) • Words with onset glides /j, w/ excluded • Manual review of output to ensure accurate formant measurements • Lobanov Normalization method (Thomas & Kendall 2007) • Total Tokens: 33,179 (For 11 vowel categories) Vowel Tokens Included in Analysis /a/ (low central) 6553 /ɔ/ (open ‘o’) 5268 /y/ (high front round) 1250 /u/ (high back round) 805 10 Overall Vowel space across 3 groups Lax Vowels Tense Vowels Pillai Scores for measuring merger • A “summary [statistic] of the degree to which two distributions are kept distinct” (Hay et al 2006) • An increasingly popular method used in sociolinguistic studies of mergers in progress (Nycz & Hall-Lew 2013) • Continuous scale from 0 (suggests most merged) to 1.0 (suggests least merged) • Separate scores calculated for each individual speaker • Makes it possible to say that speaker X is more merged than speaker Y. 12 Range of Pillai Scores for /y/ vs. /u/ 1.000 0.900 Pillai 0.800 Score of /y/ vs. /u/ 0.700 Pillai Score Range: 0.600 0.944 - 0.565 = N = 8 0.379 0.500 N = 12 N = 12 GEN GEN 13 GEN 2 speaker/y/ vs /u/ with(Lobanov the highestnormalized) Pillai Score GEN 2 speaker with the lowest Pillai Score /y/ /u/ /y/ /u/ BUN1 ZYU2 BUN1 DYUN2 SYUN3CYUN4 SYUT3 ZYU6 ZYU6 FUN1 ZYUN2 LYUN6CYUN4 CYUN4CYUN4ZYU6 FU1 SYU6ZYU6 CYUN4 ZYU1 SYU1CYUN4 GU2 FU2 LYUN6 GU2 SYU1 SYUN3 GU2 SYUN3 SYUN3SYUN3DYUN6 BUN2 ZYU6 GU2 ZYU3 SYUN3 CYUN4KYUT3SYU1CYUN4 GU2GUN1 BUN2 SYUN2ZYU6 SYUN3 HYUN1 GU2GU2BUN6 BUN3 FU6 FUT3GU2 GU1 GU2GU2 CYUN4 BUN2 SYUT3 CYUN4SYU1 FU1 GU3 SYUN2 BUN2 CYUN4 CYUN4 GU2 F1 ZYU6 GU2GU1 BUN2 SYUT3SYUN3 GU2 GU2 BUN1BUN1 TYUN4 GU2 CYUN4LYUN6 BUN2 BUN1 BUN1 BUN3FUN2 BUN2 GU2 CYUN4 GU2 GU2 GUN2 MUN6 BUN2 HYUN1 BUN2GU2 BUN2 BUN2 450 400 350 300 BUN1 BUN2 C2F21B 1800 1600 1400 1200 1000 F2 YU = /y/ U = /u/ 14 Pillai Score Results for /a/ ~ /ɔ/ p* < 0.05 n.s. 0.850 /ɔ/ Pillai Score of /a/ vs. /ɔ/ 0.700 Pillai Score Range: 0.816 - 0.591 = 0.550 p** < 0.01 0.225 GEN GEN 0.379 for /y/ vs. /u/ Functional load: Minimal Pairs • Calculated based on Yue-Hashimoto’s (1972) syllabary • All possible contrastive CVC + tone sequences that occur in attested lexical items are counted • Possible since most morphemes are monosyllabic EXAMPLE Rime: /ɔ/ (open syllable) Rime: /a/ (open syllable) Onsets Onsets Tone b p m f Tone b p m f 55 + + + + [bɔ55], [pɔ55], [mɔ55], [fɔ55] 55 + + + + [ba55], [pa55], [ma55], [fa55] 4 MINIMAL PAIRS 35 + + + 35 + + + + 3 MINIMAL PAIRS 33 + + + 33 + + + + 3 MINIMAL PAIRS 21 + + 21 + + + 2 MINIMAL PAIRS 23 23 + 0 MINIMAL PAIRS 22 + 22 + + 1 MINIMAL PAIR PROCESS REPEATED FOR ALL CONTRASTIVE RIMES IN SYLLABARY Results: Number of Minimal Pairs /y/ ~ /u/ /a/ ~ /ɔ/ Contrastive CVC+Tone Combos 3 X 35 = 105 SAMPLE MINIMAL PAIRS /y/ ~ /u/ /a/ ~ /ɔ/ [kyn55] ‘to donate’ 捐 vs. [kun55] ‘official’ 官 [ka55] ‘family’ 家 vs. [kɔ55] ‘elder brother’ 哥 [kyn35] ‘roll’ 捲 vs. [kun35] ‘building’ 館 [ka35] ‘fake’ 假 vs. [kɔ35] ‘that’ 嗰 [kyn33] ‘to care for’ 眷 vs. [kun33] ‘container’ 罐 [ka33] (final particle) 㗎 vs. [kɔ33] (generic classifier) 個 And at least 102 more contrastive CVC+Tone pairs! LOWER FUNCTIONAL LOAD HIGHER FUNCTIONAL LOAD Lexical frequency in HLVC Data Analyzed Vowel Categories GEN 1 GEN 2 HK Total /a/ 2933 1788 1342 6553 HIGHEST LEXICAL FREQUENCY /ɔ/ 2240 1700 1229 5268 11,821 TOKENS TOTAL /ɐ/ 2134 1578 1274 5297 /i/ 1781 1315 585 4289 /ʊ/ 1237 884 633 2754 /ɛ/ 1045 795 504 2519 MORE THAN A 5-FOLD DIFFERENCE /ɪ/ 1010 626 495 2130 /œ/ 737 362 414 1662 /y/ 563 321 263 1250 2,055 TOKENS TOTAL /u/ 429 164 199 805 /ɵ/ 153 125 64 652 LOWEST LEXICAL FREQUENCY 14262 9658 7002 33179 Summary • Possible English influenced mergers addressed for two pairs of vowels in Toronto Heritage Cantonese • Evidence of merger found for only of these pairs • /y/ vs. /u/ • Functional load of both pairs of vowels calculated in terms of: • Number of minimal pairs • Lexical frequency • /a/ vs. /ɔ/ has much higher functional load based on these two measures • 35 times more minimal pairs than /y/ ~ /u/ • Occur more than 5 times more often /y/ or /u/ in HLVC Corpus data Discussion • Functional load (Wedel et al 2013) can be used to account for which phonemes are most susceptible to merger in a language contact setting • The higher functional load of /a/ ~ /ɔ/ may help Cantonese heritage speakers better learn the contrast than /y/ ~ /u/ distinction • This could explain why only /y/ ~ /u/ merger observed and only for a subset of speakers who have lower proficiency proxy scores (Tse 2019a) Conclusion • “Access to two distinct
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