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.
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