Proceedings Fonetik 2009 - Institutionen för lingvistik

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Proceedings, FONETIK 2009, Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm UniversityReduplication with fixed tone pattern in KammuJan-Olof Svantesson 1 , David House 2 , Anastasia Mukhanova Karlsson 1 and Damrong Tayanin 11 Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund University2 Department of Speech, Music and Hearing, KTH, StockholmAbstractIn this paper we show that speakers of both tonaland non-tonal dialects of Kammu use afixed tone pattern high–low for intensifying reduplicationof adjectives, and also that speakersof the tonal dialect retain the lexical tones(high or low) while applying this fixed tone pattern.BackgroundKammu (also known as Khmu, Kmhmu’, etc.)is an Austroasiatic language spoken in thenorthern parts of Laos and in adjacent areas ofVietnam, China and Thailand. The number ofspeakers is at least 500,000. Some dialects ofthis language have a system of two lexicaltones (high and low), while other dialects havepreserved the original toneless state. The tonelessdialects have voicless and voiced syllableinitialstops and sonorants, which have mergedin the tonal dialects, so that the voiceless ~voiced contrast has been replaced with a high ~low tone contrast. For example, the minimalpair klaaŋ ‘eagle’ vs. glaaŋ ‘stone’ in non-tonaldialects corresponds to kláaŋ vs. klàaŋ with highand low tone, respectively, in tonal dialects.Other phonological differences between thedialects are marginal, and all dialects are mutuallycomprehensible. See Svantesson (1983) forgeneral information on the Kammu languageand Svantesson and House (2006) for Kammutonogenesis.This state with two dialects that more orless constitute a minimal pair for the distinctionbetween tonal and non-tonal languages makesKammu an ideal language for investigating theinfluence of lexical tone on different prosodicproperties of a language. In this paper we willdeal with intensifying full reduplication of adjectivesfrom this point of view.Intensifying or attenuating reduplication ofadjectives occurs in many languages in theSoutheast Asian area, including Standard Chinese,several Chinese dialects and Vietnamese.As is well known, Standard Chinese uses fullreduplication combined with the suffixes -r-deto form adjectives with an attenuated meaning(see e.g. Duanmu 2000: 228). The second copyof the adjective always has high tone (denoted¯), irrespective of the tone of the base:jiān ‘pointed’ > jiān-jiān-r-dehóng ‘red’ > hóng-hōng-r-dehǎo ‘good’ > hǎo-hāo-r-demàn ‘slow’ > màn-mān-r-deThus, the identity of the word, including thetone, is preserved in Standard Chinese reduplication,the tone being preserved in the firstcopy of it.In Kammu there is a similar reduplicationpattern, intensifying the adjective meaning. Forexample, blia ‘pretty’ (non-tonal dialect) is reduplicatedas blia-blia ‘very pretty’. This reduplicationhas a fixed tone pattern, the first copybeing higher than the second one (although, aswill be seen below, a few speakers apply anotherpattern).Material and methodWe investigate two questions:(1) Is the high–low pattern in intensifyingreduplication used by speakers of both tonaland non-tonal dialects?(2) For speakers of tonal dialects: is thelexical tone of the adjective preserved in thereduplicated form?For this purpose we used recordings of tonaland non-tonal dialect speakers that we made innorthern Laos in November 2007, and in northernThailand in February 2008. A total of 24speakers were recorded, their ages ranging between14 and 72 years. The recordings includedtwo sentences with reduplicated adjectives:naa blia-blianaa thaw-thaw‘she is very pretty’‘she is very old’This is the form in the non-tonal dialect; inthe tonal dialect, the reduplicated words areplìa-plìa with low lexical tone, and tháw-tháwwith high; the word nàa ‘she’ has low tone inthe tonal dialect. Each speaker was asked to recordthe sentences three times, but for some,only one or two recordings were obtained or82
Proceedings, FONETIK 2009, Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm Universitypossible to analyse (see table 1 for the numberof recordings for each speaker). Two of thespeakers (Sp2 and Sp4) were recorded twice.For four of the 24 speakers no useable recordingswere made. Of the remaining 20 speakers,8 speak the non-tonal dialect and 12 the tonaldialect.The maximal fundamental frequency wasmeasured in each copy of the reduplicatedwords using the Praat analysis program.Results and discussionThe results are shown in table 1.Concerning question (1) above, the resultsshow that most speakers follow the pattern thatthe first copy of the reduplicated adjective hashigher F0 than the second one. 14 of the 20speakers use this high–low pattern in all theirproductions. These are the 5 non-tonal speakersSp1, Sp3, Sp5, Sp6, Sp10 and the 9 tonalspeakers Sp2, Sp4, Sp13, Sp16, Sp20, Sp21,Sp22, Sp24, Sp25. Two speakers, Sp9 (nontonalmale) and Sp17 (tonal female) use a completelydifferent tone pattern, low–high. Theremaining speakers mix the patterns, Sp8 andSp18 use high–low for blia-blia but low–highfor thaw-thaw, and the two speakers Sp11 andSp23 seem to mix them more or less randomly.As seen in table 1, the difference in F0 betweenthe first and second copy is statistically significantin the majority of cases, especially forthose speakers who always follow the expectedhigh–low pattern. Some of the non-significantresults can probably be explained by the largevariation and the small number of measurementsfor each speakers.The second question is whether or not thetonal speakers retain the tone difference in thereduplicated form. In the last column in table 1,we show the difference between the mean F0values (on both copies) of the productions ofthaw-thaw/tháw-tháw and blia-blia/plìa-plìa. For11 of the 12 speakers of tonal dialects, F0 was,on the average, higher on tháw-tháw than onplìa-plìa, but only 2 of the 8 speakers of nontonaldialects had higher F0 on thaw-thaw thanon blia-blia. An exact binomial test shows thatthe F0 difference is significant (p = 0.0032) forthe tonal speakers but not for the non-tonalones (p = 0.144).One might ask why the majority of nontonalspeakers have higher F0 on blia-blia thanon thaw-thaw. One possible reason is that bliabliawas always recorded before thaw-thaw, andthis may have led to higher engagement whenblia-blia was recorded than when thaw-thaw wasrecorded just after that; see House et al.(forthc.) for the role of the speakers’ engagementfor Kammu intonation.ConclusionThe results show that the great majority of thespeakers we recorded used the expected fixedpattern, high–low, for intensifying reduplication,independent of their dialect type, tonal ornon-tonal. Furthermore, the speakers of tonaldialects retain the contrast between high andlow lexical tone when they apply this fixed tonepattern for adjective reduplication.AcknowledgementsThe work reported in this paper has been carriedout within the research project Separatingintonation from tone (SIFT), supported by thebank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (RJ),with additional funding from Crafoordskastiftelsen.ReferencesDuanmu, San (2000) The phonology of StandardChinese. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.House, David; Karlsson, Anastasia; Svantesson,Jan-Olof and Tayanin, Damrong(forthc.) The phrase-final accent in Kammu:effects of tone, focus and engagement. Papersubmitted to InterSpeech 2009.Svantesson, Jan-Olof (1983) Kammu phonologyand morphology. Lund: GleerupSvantesson, Jan-Olof and House, David (2006)Tone production, tone perception andKammu tonogenesis. Phonology 23, 309–333.83
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