Iambic and Trochaic Rhythm in Jieyang (Southern Min)

Suki Yiu

doi:10.3765/amp.v7i0.4480

Abstract

This paper examines the application of the Iambic/Trochaic Law to complex tone languages like Jieyang (Teochew, Southern Min). With bidirectional tone sandhi on top of its six-tone inventory, duration and intensity measurements were obtained and fitted into Linear Mixed Effects Regression models to inspect whether duration and intensity contrasts of the two sandhi types match the predictions based on the Law. Results confirmed an interaction between rhythmic type and sandhi type, and that prominence indicated by duration and intensity contrasts largely behaves the way as predicted by the Law. This suggests that tone sandhi can be metrically-motivated via duration and intensity, contributing to the rhythmic organization of tone languages altogether.This paper has provided novel support for metrical prominence of tone languages based on the Iambic/Trochaic Law, adding complex tone languages and production results to the recent literature on rhythmic groupings.

Highlights

According to the Iambic/Trochaic Law, there is a perceptual universal where intensity leads to initial prominence while duration leads to final prominence based on extralinguistic evidence (e.g. Bolton 1894, Woodrow 1909, 1951)
This paper has illustrated the application of the Iambic/Trochaic Law to complex tone languages like Jieyang (Teochew, Southern Min)
With bidirectional tone sandhi on top of its six-tone inventory, Linear Mixed Effect Regression (LMER) results based on duration and intensity measurements confirmed an interaction between rhythmic type and sandhi type

Summary

Introduction

According to the Iambic/Trochaic Law, there is a perceptual universal where intensity leads to initial prominence while duration leads to final prominence based on extralinguistic evidence (e.g. Bolton 1894, Woodrow 1909, 1951). These two types of durationally asymmetric rhythmic groupings later form the extralinguistic basis of Hayes’ (1985, 1995) proposal of an asymmetric foot inventory to explain the rhythmic structure in linguistics, referred to as Metrical Stress Theory. Considering tonal languages spoken in Asia, the more diverse tonal contrast may interact with tone sandhi and other phenomena described as stress-sensitive (Chen 2000: 285). The distinction between left and right tonal prominence displayed in bidirectional tone sandhi resembles that of a metrical distinction between iambic and trochaic rhythm

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion