Spring 2019

Mandarin Creaky Voice Correlates with Tone and Perhaps Gender

Yunting Gu

Creaky voice is a type of phonation in which the arytenoid cartilages hold the posterior end of the vocal folds together so that they can vibrate only at the other end (Ladefoged 2014, 315). Both its linguistic and paralinguistic implications have been discussed in the literature. Though Mandarin creaky voice has been studied, it is still an underdeveloped topic in Mandarin phonetics and phonology, probably due to the complexity of this phenomenon in a tonal language. This study examines Mandarin creaky voice by comparing the reading discourse and naturalistic speech of male and female speakers, contributing to studies of sociophonetics and Chinese language and gender. It confirms the observation of previous studies that there is no significant gender difference in using creaky voice in these circumstances, though female speakers are creakier than male speakers in reading discourses.  

The present study also provides a comparison of creakiness in both genders between reading discourse and semi-spontaneous connected speech. The study suggests that Mandarin speakers are not significantly different in creak in the reading discourse or the connected speech. Tone 3 utterances in Mandarin are significantly more likely to be creaky than the other three lexical tones in both circumstances, which verifies the conclusion of previous studies that creaky voice is correlated with tonal categories in Mandarin. A further experiment, which shows that the creakiness of different categories is more similar to each other without tone 3 characters than when there are tone 3 characters, suggests that the creakiness of a section of Mandarin speech largely depends on the proportion of tone 3 utterances.

Spring 2018

Talking In: Maori English as Index for Maori Identity in Film

Allura Warden

New Zealand cinema often represented Maori people as an exotic background to a paradisaical country while Pakeha were represented as heroic protagonists helping progress a backwards nation. Until recently the national film industry was almost entirely Pakeha run. Consequently, there is a dearth of Maori presence in all industry positions. However, since the Maori cultural revolution there has been progress in Maori cinematic presence which has spurred the creation of Maori-produced media. Their presence has slowly put cinematic representation into Maori hands. Language is especially important in these productions as the Maori language has declined and Maori English has gained new importance as a cultural identity marker. In this study, I examine language use in two Maori directed films, Ngati (1987) and Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), to understand how diverse Maori identities and dominant messages are supported. I achieve this by using Third and Fourth cinema theories. Film analyses of these two films have not included language and this study adds a new perspective in the analyses of both films. This study found that language is used to express Maori identity and support the dominant messages of Maori self-determinism and post-colonial critique in Ngati (1987) and Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016). In conclusion, language is an overlooked and important aspect of Maori produced media which, once taken into account, reveals salient connections between diverse expressions of Maori identity, linguistic choice, and dominant messages in each film.

Spring 2013

Registers of the Overfed: Microethnographic Discourse Analysis of Three Registers of Food Discourse

Caitlin Guszkowski

This study examines the lexicon, stance attribution pronouns, and non-linguistic semiotic features of Food and Health segments on the Today show. The features of these two registers, Food and Health, present contradictions between desired comfort/nostalgia foods and beneficial (but undesirable) healthy foods. Food presentation in the media of this nature mark healthy lifestyle choices as separate from and less preferable to regular foods. By discussing the differences and contradictions among the linguistic and paralinguistic features of food discourse on the Today show, I conclude that a more holistic understanding of nutrition, and its corroborating linguistic register of Nutrition, can recalibrate America's understanding of food to be both desirable and beneficial.

Spring 2008

Suprasegmental Structure in Meridional French and its Provençal Substrate

Alexander Marx Chabot (currently completing his Ph.D. in Sciences du langage, Université Côte d'Azur, Nice, France)

Southern French, also called Meridional French or Français du midi, has been recently recognized as a language variety separate from Standard French which deserves to be studied on its own. Nevertheless, it can be helpful to discuss Meridional French by contrasting it with Standard French, most notably by drawing attention to phonological differences between the two language varieties. Meridional French differs from Standard French in its pattern of mid vowel alternation, the common penultimate stress in lexical items, a preponderance of schwa resulting in mostly open syllables, the presence of post vocalic nasal consonants, and the existence of true diphthongs. All of these elements can be explained, with a high degree of predictive power, by examining the situation of language contact in the South of France, which has existed for at least 300 years. According to this proposal, the suprasegmental structures present in Provençal, the foot and the syllable, were transfered intact into French at the time of this language’s introduction into Provence. Such an analysis, which compares three languages, and examines a situation of language contact, takes advantage of both synchronic and diachronic methods in order to explain a purely synchronic phenomenon. The analysis is both theoretically informed and cognizant of language’s social situation. The thesis explains the source of the major differences between the two varieties of French in a simple and straightforward manner, while also shedding light on strictly synchronic problems that have previously occupied linguists interested in Meridional French.

2008

Plural Formation in Dholuo

Frances Sayako Earle (currently Assistant Professor, Communication Sciences & Disorders, University of Delaware)

Dholuo, spoken by the Luo people of Southwestern Kenya and Northern Tanzania, is known to have a complicated pattern of plural formation that is in many ways unpredictable, and published sources differ on the description of this phenomenon. This paper reconsiders the problem through the analysis of new data, taking into account likely patterns of historical inheritance. Data were obtained from a native speaker of Kisumu, South Nyanza dialect, whose pronunciation of 340 lexical items items (170 nouns and corresponding plural forms taken from Odaga’s 2005 Dholuo-English dictionary) was digitally recorded in June 2007. Synchronically, plural formation can be considered an affixation of one of two plural morphemes (-ɛ or -ni), with the precise pattern subject to regional variation), according to syllable structure. But historical considerations suggest that these morphemes may derive from an earlier number marking system that was based on three conceptual number categories (singulative, singular, plural) rather than two (singular, plural). The findings suggest that Dholuo number marking is more conservative than any of its siblings.