A prosodic and perceptional study on the Chinese interrogative pronoun “shen me” when indicating inquiry, free reference and negation Ping Wang, Xiaowen Wang ABSTRACT: This paper makes a comprehensive investigation and comparison of the prosodic and perceptual performance of the interrogative pronoun “shen me” when indicating question, free reference and negation. The results show that the prosodic performance of the sentence using “shen me” to indicate a question is similar to the prosody of an interrogative sentence; the sentence using “shen me” to indicate free reference has the intonation of a declarative sentence with the focus stress on “dou”; and the sentence using “shen me” to

A sentence-medial clause-typing intoneme in Mandarin A-NOT-A questions Chi Wang ABSTRACT: A sentence-medial intoneme is argued to be responsible for typing Mandarin A-NOT-A questions. In narrow syntax, it is merged higher than deontic modals and lower than Tense; after spell-out, it is realized phonetically as a high-low intonation starting from the left edge of the A-NOT-A predicate. This proposal is supported by a sentence-medial segmental particle in Chinese dialects, which further corroborates the Intonation-Particle Hypothesis by showing that typing particles in non-sentence-final positions are also variants of intonations. Besides, the Mandarin nuclear stress rule derives two prosodic features of A-NOT-A questions: No intonational breaks within the

On the distribution and origin of sortal classifiers in Altaic languages Shen-An Chen, Marc Allassonière-Tang, Yung-Ping Liang and One-Soon Her ABSTRACT: The grammatical feature of sortal classifiers, common in East and Southeast Asian languages, is also found in 15 of the 65 Altaic languages we have examined, though the classifiers are far fewer and used optionally. These observations suggest that the Altaic classifier systems are not indigenous. Based on the Single Origin Hypothesis that Chinese is the only language with an indigenous classifier system in Eurasia, we propose that the rise of classifiers in Altaic is due to the influence of neighboring classifier languages. Having first confirmed

Grammaticalized uses of the postverbal locative prepositional phrase in Lianhua Gan Xiaojuan Hu ABSTRACT: The postverbal locative prepositional phrase “Prep+DemLoc” of Lianhua Gan Chinese has been grammaticalized as a postverbal durative marker and a sentence-final mood particle. This study examines the syntactic and semantic properties as well as the grammaticalization of these two uses. The postverbal durative “Prep+DemLoc” is attached to some resultative verb compounds with phase complements that have the semantic features of [+dynamic], [–durative], and [+telic], and expresses the durativity of the resultant states expressed by these RVCs. It forms a contrastive distribution with the perfective marker li. The sentence-final “Prep+DemLoc” fits with the

Shì as a complementizer Zhaole Yang ABSTRACT: In this article, it is argued that a purely functional and semantically bleached shì in Mandarin could in many contexts be best analyzed as a complementizer. As such, it is comparable to English that and functions as an (optional) introducer of the clausal arguments. Our survey shows that the morpheme shì as a complementizer occurs after quite a number of clause introducing operators, for instance, epistemic modals, clausal adverbs, clausal conjunctions, and verbs taking clausal objects like psych verbs and speech-act verbs. Like in some other languages, e.g., the West African language Twi and Dutch, the complementizer can merge

Tense and lax vowels in the Lahu dialect of Yunshan: A laboratory phonological study Yan Liu, Yichen Wei, Yongxian Luo ABSTRACT: A controversy exists regarding whether there are tense-lax vowels in Lahu and whether tense-lax phonation should be accorded phonological status, an issue that is closely related to the physiological movement of the larynx. This study presents an experimental analysis of the acoustic features of the Lahu dialect of Yunshan, using electroglottography to collect acoustic and physiological data and employing VoiceSauce and Eggworks to extract glottal features to explore laryngeal mode of motion. The study demonstrates a distinct tense-lax phonation contrast in Yunshan Lahu, which is

Phonation types and morpho-phonological structure as linguistic prerequisites of tonogenesis Xiaonong Zhu ABSTRACT: This paper provides a systematic account of tonogenesis. The emergence of tone is a process of pitch upgrading from an accompanying feature of phonation types to a distinctive feature. It involves three linguistic processes: Various phonation types, clear, breathy, falsetto, etc., which intrinsically induce pitch differences; sonorous mono-syllabic morpheme structure that enhances the pitch differences; and phonologization, which conceptualizes the enhanced pitch differences to a phonological category, tone. A flowchart is designed to show how the preconditions lead to different phono-morphological types of the world’s languages and finally output tone, and its later

The role of breathy voice in Hmu tone perception Wen Liu, Gang Peng, Jiangping Kong ABSTRACT: Previous studies on tone perception have mainly focused on the role of F0, while there are few but increasing studies on the effect of non-modal phonation. This study investigates the role of non-modal phonation in perceiving the five level tones used in Hmu, in which the lowest level tone (T11) is often referred to as “breathy voice”. First, an acoustic analysis was conducted on those tones to determine the voice quality and whether breathiness is limited to specific tones, revealing that breathiness only co-occurs with T11. Second, a perception experiment

The phonetic realization of laryngeal contrasts in Lili Wu Chinese: Evidence from tone-sandhi medial position 史濛辉  白子一  陈轶亚 摘要：喉部特征的语音实现受韵律环境影响。本研究考察了黎里吴语塞音声母三分特征在连调域词中位置上的语音实现。在单字及连调域词首位置，黎里吴语以中古调类为条件(上去入)出现“送气分调”现象，即送气声母后元音的基频(f0)显著低于不送气声母后的，与浊声母后元音的f0接近。实验结果显示，在连调域词中位置，“送气分调”现象消失，取而代之的是类似上海话的典型的“首音节控制”连读变调模式，不同声母条件下的f0趋同。但浊音起始时间(VOT)及第一、二谐波差(H1*–H2*)能在一定程度上将不同声母区别开来。此外，前字音高及后字音节结构都对塞音声母的语音实现有影响。这些结果一方面体现了黎里吴语声母与声调的音系特征同语音实现之间的多样性；另一方面也体现了音系规则与语音规则的复杂联系，进一步说明了实验方法在探究汉语方言语音议题上的重要性。

Indefinite article kɤʔ5 (个) and three types of indefinite noun phrases in Guangfeng dialect of Shangrao, Jiangxi Qingwen Zhang, Cui Jiang ABSTRACT: A controversy exists regarding whether there are tense-lax vowels in Lahu and whether tense-lax phonation should be accorded phonological status, an issue that is closely related to the physiological movement of the larynx. This study presents an experimental analysis of the acoustic features of the Lahu dialect of Yunshan, using electroglottography to collect acoustic and physiological data and employing VoiceSauce and Eggworks to extract glottal features to explore laryngeal mode of motion. The study demonstrates a distinct tense-lax phonation contrast in Yunshan Lahu, which