<OT> New Posting: ROA-921

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 921-0707

Phonological Elision in Malaysian Cantonese Casual Speech

YinHsiar Sabrina Ong <ong_yh at hotmail.com>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=921


Abstract:
In fast and casual speech, speakers of Malaysian Cantonese
(MyCan) have the tendency to not fully articulate each syllable,
there is elision of phonological segments during the utterance
of familiar items, often characterized as either as allegro
speech or as casual speech, akin to 'wanna' from 'want to'
in English.


MyCan elision is commonly attested in casual utterances
of trisyllabic strings, and it only applies at the boundaries
between syllables, known as Window of Elision (WoE). The
locus of elision is generally at the initial and medial
syllables (WoE-1), sometimes triggering the merger of adjacent
syllables and produces a disyllabic output, detectable through
spectrographic analysis. This effect is attributed to the
combination of the binarity requirement in casual prosody,
and the rightheadedness of MyCan prosody.


Merging of syllables after casual speech elision is blocked
if there are intervening residue consonants. This blocking
produces bizarre obstruent syllables when the residue consonants
are not allowed to form clusters. Interestingly, obstruent
syllables are only produced when the input sequence involve
reduplication of some kind. This is a pattern that cannot
be accounted for it elision is solely triggered by the prosodic
requirement. Rather it must be due to a constraint on redundant
information found in reduplicants to surface during casual
speech. Only unrecoverable information is allowed to surface.


There are also cases where elision cannot apply, no matter
how familiar that item is. Clearly then, casual speech elision
is restricted only to the susceptible segments. In fact,
elision involves only either reduplicants or a very specific
set of consonant segments: [j, w, h, t, tÊ°, s, ts, tsÊ°,
k] for onsets and [i, u, m, n, Å‹, t, k] for codas.

Comments: 
Keywords: elision, Malaysian Cantonese
Areas: Phonology
Type: Masters Dissertation

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=921