Tonal Mapping in Cantonese Vocative Reduplication

Tonal Mapping in Cantonese Vocative Reduplication

A perceptual account for Cantonese vocative reduplication

Both phonological and morphological reasons have been suggested to account for mismatched elements in reduplicative outputs (e.g. gbóná is reduplicated as gbí-gbóná in Yoruba). However, the mismatched tonal sequences in Cantonese vocative reduplication are not amenable to either account (namely, the Emergence of the Unmarked account and the Morphological Doubling Theory account). This study pro...

Reduplication across Categories in Cantonese

This paper investigates the formal semantics of reduplication in Cantonese, i.e. how the meaning of reduplicated forms are encoded and computed with the given meaning from the base forms. In particular, this paper argues that reduplication denotes a summation function that adds up arguments (be they object-, eventor degreearguments) and return a collection of the elements. The surface differenc...

Changzhi Suffix Tonal Reduplication

In this paper, a floating tonal reduplicant suffix is proposed to re-analyze Changzhi Chinese suffix tone sandhi (Hou 1983), which has been presented as major evidence for Contour Tone Units (CTU). All stem contour tones in Changzhi, except one stem level tone, overwrite the underlying tone (HMH) of the adjectival and diminutive suffixes. In Yip (1980, 1989), this process was analyzed as spread...

Tonal Invariance and Downtrend in Cantonese

Studies of downtrend have reported that accents/tones are realised at progressively lower F0 values during an utterance. Listeners are reported to compensate for such F0 variations over time( Pierrehumbert 1979). Underlying the downtrend studies is the assumption that the phonological categories under investigation are invariant over time and that declination can be factored out of the quantita...