On the acoustic reality of “toneless” morphemes in Thai: Preliminary investigations from sequence-internal final particles

Main Article Content

Ratanon Jiamsundutsadee

Abstract

This study aims to examine and compare between the F0 behavior of tonal final particles and that of toneless final particles in Thai when occurring inside the intonational phrase based on naturalistic speech data. The results reveal that tonal final particles have significantly greater average rate of change values than toneless final particles, along with more substantial variability in pitch range among toneless final particles. Interestingly, cases such as Tone 2 and L% FPs do not pattern with the general trend in terms of rates of change; regardless, pitch range variability still functions as a cue to their distinction. On the whole, these findings support structural analyses which make a representational distinction between the two types of final particles in Thai.

Article Details

How to Cite
Jiamsundutsadee, R. (2023). On the acoustic reality of “toneless” morphemes in Thai: Preliminary investigations from sequence-internal final particles. Journal of Integrative and Innovative Humanities, 3(1). Retrieved from https://so07.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/DJIIH/article/view/1897
Section
General Section - Research article

References

Ambridge, B., & Rowland, C. F. (2013). Experimental methods in studying child language

acquisition. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 4(2), 149-168. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1215

Arvaniti, A., & Fletcher, J. (2020). The autosegmental-metrical theory of intonational

phonology. In C. Gussenhoven, & A. Chen (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language prosody (pp. 78-95). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198832232.001.0001

Bee, P. (1975). Restricted phonology in certain Thai linker-syllables. In J. G. Harris & J. R.

Chamberlain (Eds.), Studies in Tai Linguistics in Honor of William J. Gedney (pp. 17-

. Central Institute of English Language.

Bolinger, D. (1978). Intonation across languages. In J. Greenberg (Ed.), Universals of human

language (Vol. Phonology, pp. 471-524). Stanford University Press.

Bradley, C. B. (1911). Graphic analysis of the tone-accents of the Siamese language. Journal of

the American Oriental Society, 31(3), 282-289.

Choi, J. D. (1995). An acoustic-phonetic underspecification account of Marshallese vowel

allophony. Journal of Phonetics, 23(3), 323-347. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0095-4470(95)80164-2

Chuenkongchoo, T. (1956). The prosodic characteristics of certain particles in spoken Thai

[Master's Thesis, University of London, School of Oriental & African Studies].

Cohn, A. C. (1993). Nasalisation in English: Phonology or phonetics. Phonology, 10(1), 43-81.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0952675700001731

Cooke, J. R. (1989). Thai sentence particles: Forms, meaning and formal-semantic variations. In

Thai sentence particles and other topics (pp. 1-90). Pacific Linguistics.

Faitaki, F., & Murphy, V. A. (2020). Oral language elicitation tasks in applied linguistics

research. In The Routledge handbook of research methods in applied linguistics (pp. 360-369). Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge.

Frazier, K. (2014). Implications of autosegmental analysis in the exploration of prosodic

phonology in Mandarin Chinese [Master's thesis, Liberty University].

https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/honors/483

Gandour, J. (1974). On the representation of tone in Siamese. In J. G. Harris & J. R.

Chamberlain (Eds.), Studies in Tai Linguistics in Honor of William J. Gedney (pp. 170-195). Central Institute of English Language.

Gandour, J., Potisuk, S., & Dechongkit, S. (1994). Tonal coarticulation in Thai. Journal of

Phonetics, 22, 477-492. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0095-4470(19)30296-7

Gandour, J., Tumtavitikul, A., & Satthamnuwong, N. (1999). Effects of speaking rate on Thai

tones. Phonetica, 56(3-4), 123-134. https://doi:10.1159/000028447

Greif, M. (2010). Tones and intonation in Prinmi – a first survey. STUF - Language Typology

and Universals, 63(3), 221'251. https://doi.org/10.1524/stuf.2010.0020

Gussenhoven, C. (2004). The phonology of tone and intonation. Cambridge University Press.

Ha, K. P. (2012). Prosody in Vietnamese: Intonational form and function of short utterances in

conversation. University of Cologne

Hardcastle, W. J., & Hewlett, N. (2006). Introduction. In W. J. Hardcastle, & N. Hewlett (Eds.),

Coarticulation: Theory, data and techniques (pp. 1-5). Cambridge University Press.

Henderson, E. J. (1949). Prosodies in Siamese: A study in synthesis. Asia Minor, 1, 189-215.

Hyman, L. M. (2001). Tone systems. In M. Haspelmath, E. König, W. Oesterreicher, & W.

Raible (Eds.), Language typology and language universals (Vol. 2, pp. 1367-1379). New York, NY: Walter de Gruyter.

Hyman, L. M. (2006). Elicitation as experimental phonology: Thlantlang Lai tonology. UC

Berkeley PhonLab Annual report, 2. https://doi.org/10.5070/P74nr5n1z0

Jeon, H.-s., & Heinrich, A. (2022). Perceptual asymmetry between pitch peaks and valleys.

Speech Communication, 140, 109-127. https//doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2022.04.001

Joshua Project. (2021). Language: Ruund. https://joshuaproject.net/languages/rnd

Kallayanamit, S. (2004). Intonation in Standard Thai: Contours, registers and boundary tones

(Publication No. 3148629) [Doctoral dissertation, Georgetown University]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Database.

Keane, E. (2006). Prominence in Tamil. Journal of the International Phonetic Association,

(1), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100306002337

Keane, E. (2012). The intonational phonology of Tamil. In S.-a. Jun (Ed.), Prosodic typology II:

The phonology of intonation and phrasing (pp. 118-153). doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199567300.003.0005

Keating, P. A. (1988). Underspecification in phonetics. Phonology, 5(2), 275-292.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S095267570000230X

Ladd, D. R. (2008). Intonational phonology (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Law, S.-p. (1990). The syntax and phonology of Cantonese sentence-final particles (Publication

No. 9022980) [Doctoral dissertation, Boston University]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Database.

Leben, W. (1973). Suprasegmental phonology [Doctoral Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of

Technology].

Lionnet, F., & Hyman L. M. (2018). Current issues in African phonology. In T. Güldemann

(Ed.), The languages and linguistics of Africa (pp. 602-708). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110421668-006

Luksaneeyanawin, S. (1983). Intonation in Thai [Doctoral dissertation, The University of

Edinburgh]. Edinburgh Research Archive. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6722

Luksaneeyanawin, S. (1998). Intonation in Thai. In D. Hirst, & A. Di Cristo (Eds.), Intonation

systems: A survey of twenty languages (pp. 376-394). Cambridge University Press.

McPherson, L. E. (2011). Tonal underspecification and interpolation in Tommo So [Master's

thesis, University of California, Los Angeles]. https://linguistics.ucla.edu/general/matheses/McPherson_UCLA_MA_2011.pdf

McPherson, L. E. (2013). A Grammar of Tommo So. De Gruyter Mouton.

Morén, B., & Zsiga, E. (2006). The lexical and post-lexical phonology of Thai tones. Natural

Language & Linguistic Theory, 24(1), 113-178. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-004-5454-y

Moussa, H. A. (2019). Jeddah Arabic intonation: An autosegmental-metrical approach [Master's

Thesis, Newcastle University]. http://theses.ncl.ac.uk/jspui/handle/10443/5386

Noss, R. (1964). Thai reference grammar. Foreign Service Institute.

Odden, D. (1982). Tonal phenomena in Kishambaa. Studies in African Linguistics, 13(2),

-208.

Pierrehumbert, J. (1980). The phonology and phonetics of English intonation [Doctoral

dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology].

Pittayaporn, P. (2014). Prosody of final particles in Thai: Interactions between lexical tones and

boundary tones [Manuscript in preparation].

Ross, E. D., Edmondson, J. A., & Seibert, G. B. (1986). The effect of affect on various acoustic

measures of prosody in tone and non-tone languages: A comparison based on computer analysis of voice. Journal of Phonetics, 14, 283-302.

Welmers, W. E. (1959). Tonemics, morphotonemics, and tonal morphemes. General Linguistics,

(1), 1-9.

Wong, W. P., Chan, M., & Beckman, M. E., (2005). An autosegmental-metrical analysis and

prosodic annotation conventions for Cantonese. In S.-a. Jun (Ed.), Prosodic typology: The phonology of intonation and phrasing (pp. 271-299). https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199249633.003.0010

Xu, Y. (2005-2021). ProsodyPro. http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uclyyix/ProsodyPro/

Yip, M. (1980). The tonal phonology of Chinese [Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute

of Technology]. DSpace@MIT. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/15971

Yip, M. (2002). Tone. Cambridge University Press.

Zhang, J. (2018). A comparison of tone normalization methods for language variation research.

Proceedings for the 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, (pp. 823-831). Hong Kong. https://aclanthology.org/Y18-1095.pdf