Aspects of tone in Cantonese English

Abstract

This thesis argues that Cantonese English has a privative tone system: /H, Ø/, where Ø syllables either receive derived tones or retain their tonal underspecification on the surface, using both phonetic and phonological evidence. Fitting a smoothing spline analysis of variance, a statistical tool used for lingual contour comparison in ultrasound imaging (e.g. Davidson 2006) to the F0 data, I compare the tone contours of different surface tones in Cantonese English and find that the realisation of Ø is sensitive to word/utterance boundary and utterance type, contributing to its distinctiveness in terms of pitch use. On the surface, the pre-high Ø syllables in a word are specified as M. The post-high Ø syllables are specified as continuing H in non-utterance-final words, and as a L% and a H% at the utterance-final boundary of statements and questions respectively. Any residual post-high Ø syllable in utterance-final words remains underspecified in their surface representation but has a tone due to interpolation. I demonstrate in an OT analysis that with the relative ranking among markedness constraints domain-specific *Ø, ANCHOR-{L%, H%}, RT, *Ø...H, *H...M, and faithfulness constraints IDENT-T and DEPASSOC-T, the attested surface representations of tones can be obtained. The discovery of underspecified tone in Cantonese English echoes the literature on surface underspecification in African languages (e.g. Pulleyblank 1983, Myers 1998, McPherson 2012) in addition to works on tonal underspecification in other languages (e.g. Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988), and calls into question many fully specified tonal analyses of other later acquired languages spoken with a tonal mother tongue. The tonology of Cantonese English introduces an interesting case to typological studies since its tone system resembles African ones but the tonal behaviour of H and Ø combine properties of Asian tone systems and English intonation. Given that cognitive research on music and language (e.g. Deutsch et al. 1999, Deutsch et al. 2004) has shown that the use of pitch in music and language are closely related, I also attempt to examine whether there is a musical analogue to the use of pitch intervals in Cantonese English with reference to those in Cantonese. The tonal space, spatial relationship among different tone pairs, and flexibility of tones are portrayed on a tone scale of musical interval (MI). The MIs of tones in Cantonese English are related to those for Cantonese to some extent, with corresponding tone pairs in Cantonese English and Cantonese. MI as a tone scale could be useful for tonal analysis and comparison between languages which make systematic use of pitch at the lexical level.