Jan-Olof Svantesson

Tone production, tone perception and Kammu tonogenesis

The Northern and Western dialects of the Mon-Khmer language Kammu use fundamental frequency to distinguish words, while the Eastern dialect relies on the contrastive voicing of initial consonants t ...

Tone 4 and Tone 3 discrimination in Modern Standard Chinese

Productions of Tone 4 and Tone 3 (mài/măi, ‘sell’/‘buy’) in comparable sentences suggest that although the two tones are realized in different ways by different speakers in different speech acts, some features are constant. Tone 3 is connected with a low pitch level throughout the second half of the vowel and Tone 4 with a gradual fall over the main part of the vocalic segment. These observations were tested in a series of manipulations of pitch movements over mài from Tone 4 to Tone 3 in the sentence Sòng Yán mài niúròu. The manipulated sentences were presented in a test, in which listeners were asked if they heard mài or năi. The result confirmed the observed constant features and indicated in addition that it was important for both tones to have a clear reference. The identification of Tone 4 was favoured by an introductory rising or level part, and for Tone 3 an introductory fall seemed to be important. Creaky voice is a concomitant but not a necessary feature of Tone 3.

Vowel harmony shift in Mongolian

It has generally been assumed that Mongolian has vowel harmony of the palatal (front-back) type, but in this article I will present acoustic data from several Mongolian dialects, which show that there has been a shift in the phonetic basis of vowel harmony from palatality in Classical Mongolian to pharyngeality in modern East Mongolian (including Khalkha and Inner Mongolian). I will also treat Mongolian vowel harmony and the vowel harmony shift in terms of generative phonology. As far as I know, this is the first time a vowel harmony shift has been descripted in detail, and the description gives rise to several problems which cannot be solved using Chomsky and Halles feature system or the different amendments to it, which have been proposed to deal with pharyngeal harmony. For this reason I have adopted the feature system worked out by Sidney Wood, based on cross-linguistic studies of vowel articulation, within which the vowel harmony shift can be described as a rule simplification. (Less)

Tonogenetic mechanisms in Northern Mon-Khmer

In this paper, tonogenesis in the four languages Northern Kammu, Blang, Hu and U is analyzed. For comparison, register development in Lamet is treated as well. All these languages belong to the Palaungic and Kammuic branches of the Mon-Khmer division of the Austroasiatic language family and are fairly closely related, but they have developed tone or register systems independently of each other. These developments can be explained by universal microprosodic properties of segments, which are used in different ways by the different languages. Tone (or register) development is connected with merger of voiced and voiceless initial consonants in Kammu, Blang and Lamet, with merger of long and short vowels in Hu, and with merger of long and short vowels combined with both initial and final consonant changes and vowel quality changes in U. Thus, the range of microprosodic properties used for tonogenesis is extremely wide in this language group.

Some cross-linguistic differences in diphthongs

In this paper we will discuss some phonetic differences that are found in the production of diphthongs. The study is of a limited scope and may be considered a pilot study. The kinds of questions that will be addressed have to do with the specification of timing in speech production. Are the vowel elements of diphthongs joined in language-specific ways, or can they be joined by more general principles, such as the assumption of a fairly constant transition duration, so that the transition rate will be faster if the distance between onset - and offset - vowels is greater? This kind of principle was proposed by Kent and Moll (1972) for some types of vowel-to-vowel sequences. Or does the duration of the transition lengthen as the distance of the transition increases, keeping the transition rate fairly constant? If any of these principles are at work, then their effects will show up acoustically in the transition duration, particularly of F2. If the Kent and Moll principle is applicable, it would for example operate as a tendency towards similar F2 transition durations in different languages for the ‘same’ diphthongs.

Intonation Adapts to Lexical Tone: The Case of Kammu

In this paper, we investigate how lexical tones interact with intonation, using data from the Austroasiatic language Kammu, one of few languages with two dialects whose only major phonological difference is the presence or absence of lexical tones. Northern (and Western) Kammu have developed tones in connection with the merger of voiceless and voiced initial consonants, while the non-tonal Eastern dialect kept the segmental opposition with no tones. We found the following prosodic hierarchy: (1) lexical tones, (2) phrase-final boundary tone, (3) focus marking. The results strongly suggest that the intonational systems of the two Kammu dialects are basically identical, and that the main differences between the dialects are adaptations of intonation patterns to the lexical tones when the identities of the tones are jeopardized.

Cyclic syllabification in Mongolian

Mongolian is a language with a rich suffix-based morphology. Underlying forms can contain long consonant strings into which schwa vowels must be epenthesized in order to create well-formed syllables. Syllabification (including epenthesis) is governed by universal principles (the sonority law, maximality, and directionality) and a few language specific rules. Syllabification is cyclic in relation to the morphology, as is shown directly by minimal pairs having the same underlying segments but different syllabifications due to different morphological structure.

Cross‐linguistic differences in diphthongs

Similar diphthongs may vary cross‐linguistically in terms of the relative duration and slope of the transition between the onset and offset of the diphthong. At moderate rates of speech this transition will constitute the major part of the diphthong in some languages, while in other languages it will be quite fast. In /ai/ the transition occupies about 60% of the total duration in American English; about 50% in Peking Chinese; but about 15% in Egyptian Arabic. In the diphthong /au/ the transition takes up the major part (about 75%) of the total duration in American English, while in Arabic and Hausa it is only about 25% of the total duration. The different transitional durations do not correlate with the total duration of the diphthong. Nor is the explanation to be sought in the phonologies of the different languages. We have also found that in Hausa and Arabic, where the diphthongs have sharp transitions, the movements of the first and second formants are not synchronous. The transition of the first form...

Gösta Bruce 1947-2010 In Memoriam

Gösta Bruce, one of our leading phoneticians, passed away on June 15 after a short illness. He was 63 years old. Gösta began his university studies in Lund in Slavic Languages studying Russian. He always enjoyed speaking Russian, a skill that was particularly useful many years later during a departmental research exchange trip to Moscow, but he found the Slavic Language department’s emphasis on classical Russian literature confining. He felt that the study and pronunciation of modern Russian was much more exciting and quickly found his way to the Department of Phonetics. There he was exposed to the strong tradition of the description of the Swedish word accents, prosody and intonation and the influence of Bertil Malmberg, Kerstin Hadding and Eva Gårding. Bertil Malmberg was appointed as the first Professor of Phonetics in Lund in 1950 and was succeeded by Kerstin Hadding in 1969 when he was appointed by the University to establish the Department of General Linguistics. Kerstin Hadding had the chair until she retired in 1980 and was succeeded by Eva Gårding, who in turn retired in 1986. Gösta was then appointed as the fourth Professor in Phonetics in Lund in 1986. Bertil Malmberg had as early as the mid 1950s carried out perception experiments showing the importance of the timing of the fundamental frequency peak related to the stressed vowel in identifying word accents in Southern Swedish. In the early 1960s Kerstin Hadding tested the influence of dialect on the perception of word accents in Swedish. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Eva Gårding published work on intonation and developed a typology for the Scandinavian word accents. At this point in time, there were abundant descriptions of word accent variations, but a systematic explanation of this variation was lacking. Gösta was excited by these challenges and chose

An introductory study of tone and intonation in a Lao dialect

Abstract The Lao language belongs to the southwestern group of the Tai languages, which apart from Thai, the main language of Thailand, also includes several minority languages of Burma, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and China (e.g. Shan and Lu). Thai and Lao form a dialect continuum and the language of northeastern Thailand, although officially regarded as a Thai dialect, is very close to Lao (for a survey see Li 1977 or Svantesson 1991).