Volume 29, Fall 2016

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Browsing Volume 29, Fall 2016 by Department "Linguistics"

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    Contrast, phonological features, and phonetic implementation: Aspiration in Blackfoot
    (University of Calgary, 2016) Windsor, Joey
    Blackfoot is generally regarded as lacking phonological contrasts based on laryngeal settings; it is typically analyzed as lacking aspiration, voiced obstruents, and the segment [h] (see Elfner 2006 or Frantz 2009). The simple fact that Blackfoot sonorants appear as voiced and obstruents as voiceless could be the result of redundancy rules (cf. Stanley 1967) or phonetic implementation rather than phonological contrast (Keyser & Stevens 2006; Stevens & Keyser 2010). However, at the end of an orthographic word, vowels in Blackfoot typically devoice such that “there can be no contrast between short and long vowels at the end of a word” (Frantz 2009:5, see also Gick et al 2012). In this study, I examine whether Blackfoot final vowel devoicing —what I argue is better characterized as aspiration— is the result of phonological specification or phonetic implementation. I argue that the laryngeal feature [SPREAD GLOTTIS] is contrastive in Blackfoot and that the phonetic implementation of this feature leads to phonological opacity and a near-merger of phonemically short and long vowels in a phonological phrase-final position such that they are perceptually identical (Frantz & Russell 1995).
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    L2 transfer of stress, tones, and intonation from Mandarin: A case study
    (University of Calgary, 2016) Chow, Una Y.
    This study examined the prosodic patterns of Mandarin, Cantonese, and English in order to address the question: Will a native speaker of Mandarin acquire Cantonese intonation more easily than English intonation? According to the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (Eckman 1997), second language (L2) features that are universally rarer than the first language (L1) features will create difficulty for L2 acquisition. English has word stress, Cantonese has lexical tones, and Mandarin has both. English has more variation in word stress patterns than Mandarin, and Cantonese has more lexical tones than Mandarin. The prediction was that a Mandarin speaker would have difficulty in acquiring English stress and Cantonese tones. In a field study, I elicited speech samples from a female, adult native speaker of Mandarin who learned Cantonese and English from age 5-6. My pitch analysis of her speech revealed near native-like intonation patterns in English. In Cantonese, however, her declarative questions reflected an overall raise in pitch range, characteristic of her Mandarin questions. My results demonstrated that the consultant showed more difficulty in her acquisition of the native intonation of Cantonese than that of English. The implication is that lexical tones interfere with L2 intonation more so than word stress, because both lexical tones and intonation rely on fundamental frequency (F0) as a primary cue.