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The Phonology and Phonetics of Rugao Syllable Contraction: Vowel Selection and Deletion

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The Phonology and Phonetics of Rugao Syllable Contraction: Vowel Selection and Deletion THE PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS OF RUGAO SYLLABLE CONTRACTION: VOWEL SELECTION AND DELETION By Chenchen Xu A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Linguistics — Doctor of Philosophy 2020 ABSTRACT THE PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS OF RUGAO SYLLABLE CONTRACTION: VOWEL SELECTION AND DELETION By Chenchen Xu In Chinese languages, when two syllables merge into one that has the segments from both, the segments compete to survive in the limited time slots (Chung, 1996, 1997; Lin, 2007). The survival or deletion of segment(s) follows a series of rules, including the Edge-In Effect (Yip, 1988) and vowel selection (R.-F. Chung, 1996, 1997; Hsu, 2003), which decide on the outer edge segments and vowel nucleus, respectively. This dissertation is dedicated to investigating the phonological patterns and phonetic details of syllable contraction in Rugao, a dialect of Jianghuai Mandarin, with more focus on the vowel selection and deletion process. First, I explored the segment selecting mechanism, including the preservation or deletion of the consonantal and vocalic segments, respectively. Based on the phonological analyses, I further investigated two major questions: 1) what determines the winner of the two vowel candidates for the limited nucleus slot in the fully contracted syllable, the linearity of the vowels (R.-F. Chung, 1996, 1997) or the sonority of the vowels (Hsu, 2003), and 2) is a fully contracted syllable phonetically and/or phonologically neutralized to a non-contracted lexical syllable with seemingly identical segments with regards to syllable constituents, lengths, and vowel quality? The corpus data suggest that, 1) the Edge-In Effect (Yip, 1988) is prevalent in Rugao syllable contraction in deciding the survival of the leftmost and rightmost segments in the pre- contraction form whether they are vocalic or not, unless the phonotactics of the language overwrite it. 2) In fully contracted syllables, the winner of the two vowel candidates is contingent upon the sonority of the vowels as well as the phonotactics of the language. Following such patterns, a forced choice experiment focused on the selection of the vowel nucleus that controlled the syllable structure and used nonce words confirmed the influence of sonority in the vowel competition and ruled out the factor of relative linear order of the vowels. Generally, the vowel of higher sonority is more likely to survive than the competitor of lower sonority ranking, assuming a vowel sonority hierarchy based on height and centrality. The surviving vowels in the contracted syllable were then further examined with production experiments and acoustic measurements. The results suggest that the deletion of the losing vowel is in fact incomplete, and manifested in two ways, 1) the contracted vowel is longer than the lexical vowel in general, although the ratio of vowel in the duration of the syllable may or may not be different, 2) the contracted vowel has different F1 and/or F2 values than its lexical counterpart, suggesting the vowel quality has altered in the contracted syllable. The phonologically defined process is shown to be phonetically quite complex, suggesting that the lexical distinction is maintained in some ways even though the two words seem neutralized. For my family and my hometown, Rugao iv ACKNOWLEGEMENTS Having to complete, revise and defend a dissertation in a global pandemic is never the way I expected my last year of my graduate school to be. But this is finally the moment. Looking back to my graduate life, I realize that I have received much encouragement and support from many people, without whom I couldn't possibly have completed this endeavor. First, I’d like to express my gratitude to my advisor and committee chair Dr. Yen-Hwei Lin. She is the reason that I chose to study phonology. Before taking her classes, I believed that phonology was not my thing. However, I fell in love with phonology the very first semester of being Dr. Lin’s student. Lin Laoshi, you always help me expand my visions and offer detailed guidance for my next steps. Your wisdom and patience are invaluable for me. Thank you for being so encouraging when I feel hesitant; thank you for being so supportive when I feel lost; and thank you for being so understanding when I feel stressed. I am so indebted to you for your tremendous support. I am also grateful for Dr. Karthik Durvasula, my committee member, who taught me so many skills and offered so much help in my research. He always pushes me to think deeper and more broadly and to challenge myself to be better. He is also a great co-author for the many papers and presentations we worked on together. Thank you, Karthik! Without your help, I couldn’t have come this far in my research. I have an amazing dissertation committee, the other two members being Dr. Suzanne Wagner and Dr. Anne Violin-Wigent. They have offered so much valuable feedback and input for my dissertation and my two comprehensive writing papers. Suzanne, thank you for your advice for my sociolinguistics comp paper, which turned into a published paper that I still enjoy v reading. And thank you for always being so, so supportive in other aspects of my graduate life. Anne, you have such a welcoming personality. I enjoyed it every time I talked to you. I would like to extend my gratitude to my teaching supervisors, Dr. Alan Munn, Dr. Xiaoshi Li and Dr. Chunghong Teng for their patient guidance. Alan, you are such a great supervisor. I love teaching linguistics because of your guidance. Thank you! Li Laoshi and Teng Laoshi, thank you for your patience in supervising my Chinese teaching. Teng Laoshi, I hope you rest in peace. I miss you. My cohort, Andrew Armstrong, Ni La Le, Ai Taniguchi, Sayako Uehara and Xiaomei Wang, my TA fellows Cara (Danny) Feldscher, Qian Luo and Alex Mason, and friends Ho-Hsin Huang, Monica Nesbit and Yingfei Chen, have filled my graduate life with laughter and warmth. With you, I could always find a sense of belonging when home is tens of thousands of miles away. I will never forget the moments we spent together studying, laughing and having fun. I would also like to thank the many participants for my experiments, without whom I couldn't possibly have completed my research. Thank you for putting up with the nonsense words and long-ish experiments and giving me valuable data. My thank you also goes to my phonolab people. Thank you for your feedback for my research and helping me improve my presentations. Last but not least, I would like to thank my family, my husband Pengfei Ding, my son Jeremy Youheng Ding and my parents Jie Xu and Jieqin She. Thank you for always being there for me. And thank you for all your support and unconditional love. I love you more than anything. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ....................................................................................................................... X LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................................................... XI 1 INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................. 1 1.1 The concept of syllable contraction .................................................................................... 1 1.2 Syllable contraction in Chinese: sociolinguistics, phonology and phonetics ..................... 4 1.3 A brief introduction to Rugao and Rugao syllable contraction .......................................... 7 1.3.1 The dialect of Rugao ................................................................................................... 7 1.3.2 Syllable contraction in Rugao ................................................................................... 10 1.3.3 An overview of the corpus ........................................................................................ 14 1.4 An overview of this dissertation ....................................................................................... 15 1.4.1 Research questions .................................................................................................... 15 1.4.2 Methodologies........................................................................................................... 17 1.4.3 A roadmap of the dissertation ................................................................................... 18 2 PHONOLOGICAL PATTERNS ....................................................................................... 20 2.1 Introduction to the Rugao dialect...................................................................................... 20 2.1.1 Consonants ................................................................................................................ 20 2.1.2 Vowels ...................................................................................................................... 24 2.1.3 Tone .......................................................................................................................... 26 2.1.4 Syllable ..................................................................................................................... 27 2.2 Edge-In Association .......................................................................................................... 28 2.2.1 What syllable contraction is and how it happens ...................................................... 28 2.2.2 The Edge-In Effect ...................................................................................................
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