LINGUIST List 10.791

Thu May 20 1999

Books: Shanghai Tonetics

Editor for this issue: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar <aristarlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. LINCOM EUROPA, Shanghai Tonetics

SHANGHAI TONETICS 
Sean Xiaonong Zhu, The Australian National University

This study presents the first multi-speaker acoustic investigation into
the citation tones on monosyllables (Chapters 4 to 8) and the sandhi
tones on disyllables (Chapter 10) in Shanghai Chinese. It shows that
using many speakers is necessary not only for phonetics, but also
phonology. 
	Both citation and disyllabic tones are described in terms of the
following dimensions: raw duration, normalised duration, raw fundamental
frequency, and normalised fundamental frequency. Citation tones are
also described in raw intensity and normalised intensity. 
	The acoustic data collected from many speakers show, among other thing,
a great amount of between-speaker variations. To factor out these
variations, various normalisation methods for fundamental frequency,
intensity and duration are explored, and an appropriate one is
developed. Its superiority to the existing ones is demonstrated. It is
shown that highly constant patterns underlie the very considerable
surface variations. Only after these variations have been substantially
reduced, can a tonetic model be proposed in order to sufficiently
characterise the tones in a linguistic variety and, hopefully, to make
between-variety comparison. 
	To account for the between-tone fundamental frequency variations in
disyllabic tone sandhi (Chapter 10), a coordinate shift procedure is
developed and four phonetic realisation rules are formulised. These
reveal the underlying uniformity and simplicity of complicated surface
manifestations. In addition, some phonological issues are discussed,
especially the word geometry suggested for Shanghai phonology (Chapter
2), and the relationship between phonetics and phonology (Chapter 11). 

ISBN 3 89586 584 2. 
LINCOM Studies in Asian Linguistics 32. 
Ca. 200 pp. USD 60 / DM 107 / 38. 

Info: LINCOM EUROPA, Paul-Preuss-Str. 25, D-80995 Muenchen, Germany; 
FAX : +49 89 3148909; 
LINCOM.EUROPAt-online.de; 
http://home.t-online.de/home/LINCOM.EUROPA

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