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On the Paths from Voicing Contrast to Tonal Contrast Dissertation Proposal

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On the Paths from Voicing Contrast to Tonal Contrast Dissertation Proposal On the paths from voicing contrast to tonal contrast Dissertation Proposal Jia Tian Submitted on May 10, 2019 Dissertation Supervisor: Jianjing Kuang Proposal Committee: Eugene Buckley (chair), Mark Liberman, Don Ringe Contents 1 Introduction 3 1.1 The voicing contrast ............................... 4 1.1.1 Cross-linguistic variation ......................... 4 1.1.2 Contextual variation ........................... 6 1.1.3 Related sound changes .......................... 7 1.1.3.1 Cue shifting .......................... 7 1.1.3.2 Merger ............................. 9 1.1.3.3 Boundary shift/chain shift .................. 10 1.2 Listeners and speakers’ roles in sound change ................. 10 1.3 Shanghainese ................................... 12 1.3.1 From voicing contrast to tonal contrast in Chinese dialects ...... 12 1.3.2 Two ongoing sound changes of the voicing contrast in Shanghainese . 13 1.3.2.1 Stage I ............................. 14 1.3.2.2 Stage II ............................. 15 1.3.2.3 Stage III ............................ 17 1.3.3 The phonological representation of the historical voicing contrast in Shanghainese ............................... 18 1.3.3.1 Yip (Underlyingly phonation contrast) ............ 18 1 1.3.3.2 Bao and Duanmu (Underlyingly onset voicing contrast) .. 19 1.3.3.3 A summary ........................... 21 1.4 Research questions ................................ 21 2 The production of the historical voicing contrast in Shanghainese 22 2.1 Questions and hypotheses ............................ 22 2.2 Participants .................................... 25 2.3 Stimuli ....................................... 25 2.3.1 Sentence reading ............................. 26 2.3.2 Map task ................................. 26 2.4 Recording procedures ............................... 27 2.5 Measures ..................................... 27 2.5.1 Consonantal measures .......................... 27 2.5.2 Suprasegmental measures ........................ 28 2.5.2.1 Phonation ........................... 28 2.5.2.2 f0 ................................ 29 2.6 Statistical modeling ................................ 29 2.7 Results ....................................... 30 2.7.1 Word-initial stops ............................ 30 2.7.1.1 Materials ............................ 30 2.7.1.2 Results ............................. 30 2.7.2 Word-medial stops ............................ 32 2.7.2.1 Materials ............................ 32 2.7.2.2 Results ............................. 32 2.8 Discussion ..................................... 34 3 The perception of the historical voicing contrast in Shanghainese 35 3.1 Questions and hypotheses ............................ 35 3.2 Participants .................................... 37 3.3 Stimuli ....................................... 37 3.3.1 Natural stimuli .............................. 37 3.3.2 Synthesized stimuli ............................ 37 3.3.2.1 Word-initial .......................... 37 3.3.2.1.1 Stop .......................... 37 3.3.2.1.2 Fricative ....................... 38 2 3.3.2.2 Word-medial .......................... 38 3.4 Test procedures .................................. 39 3.5 Statistical modeling ................................ 39 4 The mapping between production and perception 39 4.1 Questions and hypotheses ............................ 39 5 Discussion 40 6 Future work 41 7 Planned structure of the dissertation 42 8 Time line 42 1 Introduction Most languages have obstruent voicing contrasts (Maddieson, 1984; Ladefoged & Mad- dieson, 1996), i.e., they have phonemic contrasts between classes of obstruents which differ in the laryngeal setting. That is, they differ in the mode of action of the larynx, orinthe timing of laryngeal activity in relation to the oral articulation. Arguably, voicing is one of the most important linguistic features of human languages. The voicing contrast shows considerable variation both within and across languages. Different sound changes related to the voicing contrast have been attested. In what follows I propose to examine the production and perception of the obstruent voicing contrast in contemporary Shanghainese. Shanghainese is traditionally described as having a voiced vs. voiceless voicing contrast in obstruents. Word-initially, consonantal voicing cues have been lost to some extent. Phona- tion and f0 differences exist. Word-medially, however, consonantal voicing cues still playthe most important role. Essentially, Shanghainese occupies the middle ground between, on the one hand, languages such as English in which there is only voicing contrast but no tonal contrast, and on the other hand, languages such as Mandarin in which there is no voicing contrast but only tonal contrast. I will show that the system in Shanghainese is evolving further towards a purely tonal system. The study of Shanghainese will provide important insights to questions related to tonogenesis, to the development path of the voicing contrast, and to speakers’phonological knowledge of the voicing contrast during sound change. 3 1.1 The voicing contrast 1.1.1 Cross-linguistic variation Cross-linguistically, there is considerable variation in the phonological representation and the phonetic realization of the voicing contrast. First, languages can differ at the phono- logical level. Two-way voicing contrasts such as those used in English (Lisker & Abramson, 1964; Keating, 1984; Lisker, 1986), German (Jessen, 1998; Kleber, 2018), French (Cara- mazza & Yeni-Komshian, 1974; Kirby & Ladd, 2016), and Spanish (Williams, 1977; Schmidt & Flege, 1996) are most commonly found in the world’s languages (Maddieson, 1984). Three- way voicing contrasts are also common, for example in Korean (Lisker & Abramson, 1964; Cho et al., 2002) and Thai (Lisker & Abramson, 1964; Abramson, 1989). Four-way voicing contrasts are rare cross-linguistically, but common in Indic languages such as Hindi (Lisker & Abramson, 1964; Benguerel & Bhatia, 1980; Dixit, 1989), Urdu (Hussain, 2018) and Marathi (Lisker & Abramson, 1964; Berkson, 2013, 2019). Five-way and six-way voicing contrasts are extremely rare, but also attested (e.g., Sindhi and Siraiki have five-way contrasts (Hussain, 2018); Owerri Igbo has a six-way contrast (Ladefoged et al., 1976)). Second, sometimes even though two languages are thought to have the same phono- logical contrast, they may differ at the phonetic level, either because different phonetic categories (e.g., fvoicedg, fvoiceless unaspiratedg, or fvoiceless aspiratedg) are chosen to realize the same phonological contrast or because different phonetic realizations are adopted to realize the same phonetic category. (Following Keating (1984), curly brackets “fg” are used to refer to phonetic categories as opposed to phonological features [+/-voice].) For example, although both English and Spanish have a two-way voicing contrast which may be phonologically represented as [+voice] vs. [-voice] (Keating, 1984; Kingston & Diehl, 1994; Wetzels & Mascaró, 2001), they differ significantly in the phonetic categories chosen toreal- ize the two voicing categories. On the one hand, the phonologically voiced stops in Spanish are prevoiced (i.e., there is vocal fold vibration during stop closure; there is a substantial voicing lead), while the phonologically voiceless stops are produced with a short voicing lag. Therefore, Spanish is classified as a “true voicing” language which contrasts fvoicedg stops with fvoiceless unaspiratedg ones. On the other hand, the phonologically voiceless stops in English are aspirated, while the phonologically voiced stops show short voicing lag in phrase-initial position. Therefore, English is said to be an “aspirating” language which contrasts fvoiceless aspiratedg stops with fvoiceless unaspiratedg ones. (Though see Iverson & Salmons (1995); Jessen & Roux (2002); J. Beckman et al. (2013) for the suggestion that 4 “true voicing” and “aspirating” languages differ at the phonological level: “true voicing” languages distinguish marked voiced stops ([voice]) from unmarked voiceless unaspirated stops ([ ], a blank space indicating the absence of a phonological specification), whereas an “aspirating” language distinguishes marked aspirated stops ([spread glottis]) from unmarked often passively voiced stops ([ ]).) It was originally thought that languages with two-way voicing contrasts are either “true voicing” or “aspirating” (Iverson & Salmons, 1995). In other words, no language with a two-way voicing contrast contrasts prevoiced stops with voiceless aspirated ones. However, it has been shown that some varieties of Scottish En- glish (Catford, 2001; Watt & Yurkova, 2007) and Swedish (Karlsson et al., 2004; Helgason & Ringen, 2008) contrast prevoiced stops with aspirated ones in utterance-initial position. Moreover, for any given phonetic category, a wide range of phonetic realizations exists. For example, a cross-linguistic survey of Voice Onset Time (VOT, defined as “the relative timing of events at the glottis and at the place of oral occlusion” (Lisker & Abramson, 1964)) in 18 languages showed that mean VOT of voiceless aspirated velar stops ranged from 73 ms to 154 ms in the languages being investigated (Cho & Ladefoged, 1999). Cases above are languages whose voicing contrasts can be captured by the timing of laryngeal activity in relation to the oral articulation. Some languages, however, have voicing contrasts in which VOT does not play a role in making the distinction. No languages have more than three VOT distinctions (Cho & Ladefoged, 1999).
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