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14 - Have Cantonese Tones Merged in Spontaneous Speech?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2024

By
Naomi Nagy ,
Holman Tse  and
James N. Stanford
Edited by
Rajiv Rao
Rajiv Rao
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary

This is the first variationist sociolinguistic study of Cantonese tone-merger using conversational recordings. These data differ from experimental data exploring tone mergers: the speech is continuous and spontaneous, the tones appear in diverse contexts, and speakers are from both Toronto and Hong Kong. We investigated the status of three reportedly ongoing mergers: T2/T5忍 / 引, T3/T6 印 / 孕, and T4/T6 仁 / 孕. We measured three cues (i.e., mean pitch, pitch at 90% duration of the syllable, and pitch slope) in 12,000+ tokens from thirty-two speakers. Using normalized duration and speaker pitch, mixed-effects models showed that unmerged tones are statistically distinguishable in spontaneous speech, but that two of the three “ongoing-merger” pairs are fully merged, and the third is nearly merged. Analyses included segmental and suprasegmental (i.e., phrasal position, word position, adjacent tones) factors affecting pitch. We found no differences between heritage and homeland speaker samples.

Keywords

acoustic analysisCanadaCantoneseHeritage Language Variation and Change CorpusHong Kongsociophoneticssociotoneticsspontaneous speechtone merger
Type
Chapter
Information
The Phonetics and Phonology of Heritage Languages , pp. 302 - 320
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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