Abstract
This paper addresses young Taiwanese speakers’ tone sandhi. A young speaker’s language is often a mixture of Taiwanese and Mandarin; though understanding Taiwanese, he/she frequently responds in Mandarin. This paper establishes a corpus of ‘young Taiwanese’, which reveals three different tone sandhi patterns from ‘general Taiwanese’. First, a j-break (sandhi domain break) may occur after a Xhead. Second, a j-break may occur after an adjunct XP. Finally, a j is restricted within three syllables. Young speakers seldom speak long Taiwanese expressions; they tend to break a long string into short fragments and match them with smaller syntactic or prosodic junctures.
Highlights
This paper addresses the tone sandhi of young speakers of Taiwanese, a Southern Min dialect spoken in Taiwan, hereafter, Y-Taiwanese
When there is a chance to do so, they tend to break a long string into short fragments and match them with smaller syntactic or prosodic junctures
This paper constructs a corpus of Y-Taiwanese, where the data are collected through a careful design, based on the number of syllable and a variety of morphosyntactic structures
Summary
This paper addresses the tone sandhi of young speakers of Taiwanese, a Southern Min dialect spoken in Taiwan, hereafter, Y-Taiwanese. A young speaker, though understanding Taiwanese, frequently responds in Mandarin, even at home. In terms of Chao’s (1930) tone transcription system, 5 represents high, 3 represents mid, and 1 represents low; 4 can be either high or mid and can be either mid or low, depending on the tone inventory of a language. The single numbers, 3 and 5, indicate the tones of checked syllables. A checked syllable ends in a glottal or unreleased voiceless stop, such as [ʔ], [p], [t]. As the second mora of the checked syllable is occupied by a glottal or unreleased voiceless stop, the tone that docks on this mora is inaudible. The tone inventory is listed in (1), and the relevant tone sandhi rule is given in (2)
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