Chinese meets Malay meets English: The origins of Colloquial Singaporean English tone (original) (raw)
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Non-Plateaus, Non-Tonal Heads: Tone assignment in Colloquial Singaporean English
This paper presents an optimality theory account of stress-dependent tone assignment in Chinese speakers’ Colloquial Singaporean English (CSE). Disagreements between previous transcriptions are reconciled, showing that speakers use low, mid, high and unspecified tone. Modifications to De Lacy’s proposal on the stress-tone relationship and the Bantu constraint PLATEAU are proposed in order to cope with CSE’s tonal inventory.
The East Asian Voicing Shift and its role in the origins of tone and register
95th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, 2021
Video poster presentation with narration available here: https://youtu.be/\_Ma7PfrSSn4 We present here a new unified model to explain the origins and evolution of tone and register in East and Southeast Asia, topics which have generally been investigate separately in different academic circles. After briefly introducing this new Desegmental Model, we focus in on one of its principle component sound change mechanisms which we call the East Asian Voicing Shift (EAVS). Through EAVS, onset voicing contrasts transphonologize into a register contrast upheld by a bundle of co-varying phonetic cues including pitch, voice quality and vowel quality. With few exceptions, this register contrast then either conditions a doubling of the lexical tone inventory in languages which already employ lexically contrastive pitch or it conditions a doubling of the vowel inventory in languages which do not. EAVS is massive in scope, having affected the vast majority of langauges in the region across five separate langauge families. It is perhaps the most sweeping sound change event yet described in linguistics.
Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 2010
Singapore English, by David Deterding, does not fail to deliver in the author's usual manner: the strengths for which he is well known are ever present in this slim volume. His treatment of Singapore English (SgE) is systematic, and written in a clear and succinct style. The volume starts with a concise introduction to the history and sociolinguistics of Singapore and the methodological concerns of the study, followed by chapters on phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, discourse and lexis. It closes with an account of recent history and current changes, involving in particular language and educational policies which have a bearing on the development of SgE compared to other New Englishes in Asia. As with many of the author's collections, there is also a useful annotated bibliography; and finally, a full transcript of the data is also appended. This review will primarily concern itself with the phonetics and phonology aspects of the volume. The phonetics and phonology chapter includes brief descriptions of some of the more characteristic features of SgE segmentals-e.g. the use of alveolar stops or labiodental fricatives for dental fricatives, final consonant cluster simplification, final glottal stop, aspiration, vocalised [l], non-prevocalic [r], labiodental [r], the absence of length distinction in vowel pairs, the merger of vowel contrasts, the monophthongisation of FACE and GOAT vowels, the realisation of POOR and CURE vowels, and of triphthongs, and the occurrence of reduced vowels. Suprasegmentals, including rhythm, stress and intonation are also covered. These are generously illustrated with examples from the Lim Siew Hwee Corpus of Informal Singapore Speech (Deterding & Lim 2005). Altogether the account does a very good job of capturing the essence of the sound system of SgE. In the representation of the monophthongs though, it would perhaps have been more appropriate to use [a] rather than [Ø] for the symbol for the START/ PALM/ BATH/ STRUT vowel (pp. 13, 26), to better represent a low and central vowel, lower in quality that the British English (BrE) STRUT vowel, as used in Lim (2004a) and adopted by Gupta (2005). The description is in some sections supported by quantitative measures, such as frequency counts (e.g. the various pronunciations of [T] in different positions or for various words, pp. 15-16; the incidence of reduced vowels in function words, p. 30), as well as acoustic analyses conducted on the data (e.g. a plot of formant 1 and 2 for monophthongs, p. 24; measurements of fundamental frequencies from pitch tracks to support the description of intonation contours of discourse particles, pp. 67-70). Such quantitative data comprise a most laudable inclusion, as these provide readers with a clearer awareness of which variant(s) are more commonly occurring in SgE, and a more objective, quantitative measure of a qualitative description, and it would have been even better if this was more widely included, in addition to the instances mentioned above. Also accompanying the descriptions at times are suggestions for reasons for the pattern observed (e.g. the more common a word, the greater tendency for a dental fricative to be used rather than alveolar stops, pp. 15-16). A methodological limitation of the account in the volume is the fact that its primary source of data is a corpus comprising one hour's worth of speech of one ethnically Chinese young female on a single occasion. The author suggests at the outset that this helps solve 'the problems of variation' (p. 6), and allows him to 'describe a coherent variety of the language in some detail' (p. 6). While it is indeed the case that many descriptions of the sound systems
Linguistic Society of America, 2019
As is common in work on prosodic typology, the notions 'tone' and 'stress' play a key role in Wee's 2016 study of the tone system of Hong Kong English (HKE). Based on the absence of pho-netic correlates of stress and the distribution of tone in polysyllabic words, Wee claims that HKE must have lexical (high) tone. In this reply, we argue that, even in the absence of phonetic correlates of stress, foot structure provides a more parsimonious account of the distribution of surface tones. Multiple high tones within words follow from predictable morphological structure and/or tonal spreading, rather than from lexical tone.*
Revisiting English prosody: (Some) New Englishes as tone languages?
The Typology of Asian Englishes, Lisa Lim and Nikolas Gisborne, eds. 97-118., 2011
Many New Englishes are spoken in what can o en be considered multilingual contexts in which typologically diverse languages come into contact. In several Asian contexts, one typological feature that is prominent in the multilingual contact situation (the "ecology") is tone. Given that tone is recognized as an areal feature and is acquired easily by languages in contact, the question that arises is how this is manifested in the prosody of these New Englishes. Recent work has shown that contact languages, including English varieties, evolving in an ecology where tone languages are present do indeed combine aspects of tone languages.
Tonal Evolution in Malay Dialect
The F 0 values of vowels following voiceless consonants are higher than those of vowels following voiced consonants; high vowels have a higher F 0 than low vowels. It has also been found that when high vowels follow voiced consonants, the F 0 values decrease. In contrast, low vowels following voiceless consonants show increasing F 0 values. In other words, the voicing of initial consonants has been found to counterbalance the intrinsic F 0 values of high and low vowels , Lehiste 1970. To test whether these three findings are applicable to a disyllabic language, the F 0 values of high and low vowels following voiceless and voiced consonants were studied in a Malay dialect of the Austronesian language family spoken in Pathumthani Province, Thailand. The data was collected from three male informants, aged 30-35. The Praat program was used for acoustic analysis. The findings revealed the influence of the voicing of initial consonants on the F 0 of vowels to be greater than that of the influence of vowel height. Evidence from this acoustic study shows the plausibility for the Malay dialect spoken in Pathumthani to become a tonal language by the influence of initial consonants rather by the influence of the high-low vowel dimension.
The Americanization of the phonology of Asian Englishes: Evidence from Singapore
This chapter seeks to fi nd out if the phonology of Singapore English (SgpE) has been Americanized. This chapter will focus on four pronunciation features in SgpE, namely, the postvocalicr , taps, the pronunciation of the vowel [ae] in dance , and the vowel [e ] in to ma to . In order to ascertain if there has been a "shift" or change in the phonology of SgpE, speakers of an older group aged forty and above will be compared with a younger group of speakers who are aged between twenty and twenty-fi ve. The informants for the data also consist of speakers of all three major ethnic groups in Singapore -the Chinese, Malay, and Indians, and a comparison will be made between these three groups to see if any particular ethnic variety of SgpE is more susceptible to Americanization. The results show that some American English (AmE) features are not prevalent across all age and ethnic groups. While it is perhaps not surprising that younger speakers display signifi cantly more AmE features than older speakers, it is interesting to note that the speakers of the Chinese ethnic group are the ones producing more AmE phonological features, as compared to the speakers of the other two ethnic groups. The results on the whole suggest that postcolonial Englishes, such as SgpE, adapt their linguistic features with the force of globalization.