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What /R/ Sounds Like in Kansai Japanese: a Phonetic Investigation of Liquid Variation in Unscripted Discourse

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What /R/ Sounds Like in Kansai Japanese: a Phonetic Investigation of Liquid Variation in Unscripted Discourse What /r/ Sounds Like in Kansai Japanese: A Phonetic Investigation of Liquid Variation in Unscripted Discourse by Thomas Judd Magnuson B.A., University of British Columbia, 1998 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS In the Department of Linguistics © Thomas Judd Magnuson, 2008 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author. ii What /r/ Sounds Like in Kansai Japanese: A Phonetic Investigation of Liquid Variation in Unscripted Discourse by Thomas Judd Magnuson B.A., University of British Columbia, 1998 SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE Dr. Hua Lin, Supervisor (Department of Linguistics) Dr. John H. Esling, Departmental Member (Department of Linguistics) Dr. Tae-Jin Yoon, Departmental Member (Department of Linguistics) iii Supervisory Committee Dr. Hua Lin, Supervisor (Department of Linguistics) Dr. John H. Esling, Departmental Member (Department of Linguistics) Dr. Tae-Jin Yoon, Departmental Member (Department of Linguistics) ABSTRACT Unlike Canadian English which has two liquid consonant phonemes, /ɹ, l/ (as in right and light ), Japanese is said to have a single liquid phoneme whose realization varies widely both among speakers and within the speech of individuals. Although variants of the /r/ sound in Japanese have been described as flaps, laterals, and weak plosives, research that has sought to quantitatively describe this phonetic variation has not yet been carried out. The aim of this thesis is to provide such quantification based on 1,535 instances of /r/ spoken by four individuals whose near-natural, unscripted conversations had been recorded as part of a larger corpus of unscripted Japanese maintained by Dr. Nick Campbell of Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR), Kyoto, Japan. iv Tokens of /r/ were extracted from 30-minute conversations between one pair of male speakers and one pair of female speakers. Each token was narrowly transcribed into the International Phonetic Alphabet, then categorized based on the author’s perception of: 1) the strength/narrowness of central oral articulatory stricture, and 2) the presence or absence of an auditory-perceptual lateral and/or rhotic sound quality. Transcription and category frequencies for each speaker averaged across all environments were then compared with frequencies in specific phonological environments to ascertain whether a particular environment was amenable to a ‘drift’ towards any particular category of variant, and whether patterns of ‘drift’ applied to all speakers or varied on an individual basis. Transcriptions of the 1,535 tokens of /r/ ranged widely among lateral and non-lateral flaps, raised (i.e. increased articulatory contact) non-lateral flaps akin to light voiced plosives (e.g. Hattori 1951, Kawakami 1977), as well as lateral approximants and rhotic approximants. While two of the four speakers, both males, patterned similarly by dividing their productions of /r/ chiefly among short lateral approximants and rhotic approximants, each speaker did vary considerably in their choice of variants in any given environment. Drift is considered in terms of physiological parameters which may be optionally exploited to maintain phonological salience. v TABLE OF CONTENTS SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE...................................................................................ii ABSTRACT.................................................................................................................iii TABLE OF CONTENTS...............................................................................................v LIST OF TABLES......................................................................................................viii LIST OF FIGURES.......................................................................................................x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS..........................................................................................xi DEDICATION.............................................................................................................xii Chapter One: INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………..… 1 1.1 Study motivation ........................................................................................................ 1 1.2 Why is sub-phonemic variation in Japanese flaps worth looking at? ....................... 2 1.3 Research questions ..................................................................................................... 5 1.4 Organization of this thesis .......................................................................................... 6 Chapter Two: LITERATURE REVIEW…………………………………………………. 7 2.1 The sounds of Japanese .............................................................................................. 7 2.2 Standard versus Kansai Japanese ............................................................................. 10 2.3 Rhotics as a class of speech sounds ........................................................................ 14 2.3.1 The family resemblances model (Lindau 1985) .............................................. 17 2.4 What is a [ɾ]? ........................................................................................................... 21 2.5 The behaviour of flaps in other languages .............................................................. 25 2.6 Some different views of /r/ in Japanese .................................................................. 26 2.6.1 Amanuma et al. (2004) ..................................................................................... 27 2.6.2 Okamura (1995). ............................................................................................... 28 2.6.3 Kawakami (1977) ............................................................................................. 28 2.6.4 Hattori (1951) ................................................................................................... 29 2.6.5 Okada (1999) .................................................................................................... 30 2.6.6 Akamatsu (1997, 2000) .................................................................................... 31 2.7 Articulatory studies of Japanese /r/ ......................................................................... 32 Chapter Three: STUDY METHODOLOGY……………………………………………. 35 3.1 The data .................................................................................................................... 35 3.2 The speakers ............................................................................................................. 36 3.3 Native speaker accent evaluation ............................................................................. 38 3.3.1 Judges’ assessments: JFA ................................................................................. 40 3.3.2 Judges’ assessments: JFB ................................................................................. 41 3.3.3 Judges’ assessments: JMA ................................................................................ 42 3.3.4 Judges’ assessments: JMB ................................................................................ 43 vi 3.4 Data preparation ....................................................................................................... 43 3.4.1 Segmentation ..................................................................................................... 45 3.4.2 Defining an r-domain ........................................................................................ 45 3.5 Data transcription ..................................................................................................... 47 3.5.1 Transcribing rhoticity and laterality based on auditory impressions ............... 49 3.6 Categorization .......................................................................................................... 52 3.7 Intra-rater reliability of transcriptions and categories .............................................. 55 Chapter Four: RESULTS………………………………………………………………… 58 4.1 Transcription frequencies: Entire dataset ................................................................. 58 4.2 Descriptions of most frequent variants .................................................................... 60 4.2.1 Raised non-rhotic non-lateral flap [ɾ̝] ............................................................... 60 4.2.2 Short alveolar lateral approximant [l]̆ .............................................................. 62 4.2.3 Alveolar lateral flap [ɺ] ..................................................................................... 63 4.2.4 Alveolar non-lateral flap [ɾ] ............................................................................. 65 4.2.5 Lowered alveolar lateral flap [ɺ̞] ...................................................................... 67 4.2.6 Lowered non-lateral flap [ɾ̞] ............................................................................. 68 4.2.7 Alveolar rhotic approximant [ɹ] ....................................................................... 69 4.3 Amplitude as measure of auditory signal disruption ............................................... 71 4.4 Category frequencies: Entire dataset ....................................................................... 74 4.4.1 Category frequencies: Entire dataset, by speaker ............................................ 75 4.5 Phonemic environment frequencies
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