TONE SYSTEMS OF DIMASA AND RABHA: A PHONETIC AND PHONOLOGICAL STUDY By PRIYANKOO SARMAH A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2009 1 © 2009 Priyankoo Sarmah 2 To my parents and friends 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The hardships and challenges encountered while writing this dissertation and while being in the PhD program are no way unlike anything experienced by other Ph.D. earners. However, what matters at the end of the day is the set of people who made things easier for me in the four years of my life as a Ph.D. student. My sincere gratitude goes to my advisor, Dr. Caroline Wiltshire, without whom I would not have even dreamt of going to another grad school to do a Ph.D. She has been a great mentor to me. Working with her for the dissertation and for several projects broadened my intellectual horizon and all the drawbacks in me and my research are purely due my own markedness constraint, *INTELLECTUAL. I am grateful to my co-chair, Dr. Ratree Wayland. Her knowledge and sharpness made me see phonetics with a new perspective. Not much unlike the immortal Sherlock Holmes I could often hear her echo: One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature. I am indebted to my committee member Dr. Andrea Pham for the time she spent closely reading my dissertation draft and then meticulously commenting on it. Another committee member, Dr. Jimmy Harnsberger spent hours personally supervising the statistics and experimental parts of my dissertation. The teaching faculty at the linguistics program of the University of Florida has always been very kind to me. I will always remember the contribution of Dr. Fiona McLaughlin, Dr. Ann Wehmeyer, Dr. Edith Kaan, Dr. Jules Glieche, Dr. M.J. Hardman, Dr. Virginia LoCastro, Dr. Gary Miller, and Dr. Diana Boxer in broadening my understanding of linguistics and academia in general. 4 Helping me overcome all the stressful times in my PhD program were my fellow lab-rats: Dr. Mohammed Al-Khaiiry, Dr. Bin Li, Dr. Bao Mingzhen, Chris Barkley, Dr. Andrea Dallas. Linguistics has been fun fun and fun with all of them around. Outside Turlington, my home in Gainesville was Belle’s house and my family was Apple, Nan, Tony and many other Thai friends. They readily provided any academic or personal help I needed in Gainesville. My sincere gratitude goes to my Assamese friends in Gainesville who literally made me feel at home during various parts of my four years of stay in Gainesville- Chandan Talukdar, Sakib Rahman Saikia, Siddrat Taufik Saikia, Randeep Khaund, Ananya Bhuyan and Dr. Prabir Barooah- thank you all. My heartiest thanks go to my study buddy Eva (Zheng Weihua) for her constant persuasions whenever she felt I am slowing down in my work- I owe you big time! Thanks to Sean (Sangyeon Park) for the great company during the time of writing this dissertation. My heartiest thanks go to the other two members of the 2004 trio Jimmy and Mutsuo. Thanks to my first and close friend in Gainesville, Jimmy (Huang Chun) for putting up with me all these years. Thanks Mutsuo, for never saying no to anything that I demanded! I would like to express my gratitude to all the beautiful people in the city of Gainesville, Florida who made my four years in the city a memorable experience. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................4 LIST OF TABLES ...........................................................................................................................9 LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................................11 ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................................15 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................16 Research Questions .................................................................................................................16 Languages of the Present Study ..............................................................................................17 The Dimasa Language .....................................................................................................17 The Rabha Language .......................................................................................................20 Dimasa and Rabha Morphological Structures .................................................................21 The Current Study ...................................................................................................................23 Tonal Inventory of Dimasa and Rabha ............................................................................24 Morphophonemics of Dimasa and Rabha .......................................................................24 Overview of Tone Languages .................................................................................................25 Tone Languages of the World .........................................................................................28 African Tone Languages .................................................................................................29 Asian Tone Languages ....................................................................................................30 Tones in Tibeto-Burman Languages ......................................................................................33 Tibetan Languages ...........................................................................................................33 Assam-Burmese ...............................................................................................................34 Structure of the Study .............................................................................................................36 2 METHODOLOGY .................................................................................................................37 Data Collection .......................................................................................................................37 Participants ......................................................................................................................37 Materials ..........................................................................................................................38 Recording ........................................................................................................................40 Data Analysis ..........................................................................................................................40 Segmentation of Speech ..................................................................................................40 Acoustic Analyses ...........................................................................................................41 Extracting non-normalized pitch values ...................................................................41 Extracting normalized pitch values ..........................................................................43 Statistical Analysis ..................................................................................................................43 Theoretical Framework ...........................................................................................................44 6 3 TONES IN MONOSYLLABLES ..........................................................................................45 Dimasa Monosyllables ............................................................................................................45 Data Collection ................................................................................................................46 Acoustic Analysis ............................................................................................................47 Effect of Onset and Coda on Pitch ..................................................................................52 Statistical Analyses ..........................................................................................................53 Normalization of Data .....................................................................................................55 Perception Test ................................................................................................................60 Rabha Monosyllables ..............................................................................................................61 Data Collection ................................................................................................................61 Acoustic Analysis ............................................................................................................62 Statistical Analysis ..........................................................................................................68 Discussion ...............................................................................................................................70 Dimasa Monosyllables ....................................................................................................73 Rabha Monosyllables ......................................................................................................74 4 TONES IN DISYLLABLES