Beijing Mandarin Research Articles

Acoustic and articulatory variation of Mandarin diphthong /ou/

Abstract This study compared dynamic formant trajectories and corresponding ultrasound tongue data of the diphthong /ou/ in Taiwan Mandarin and Beijing Mandarin speakers. Results of the Generalized Additive Mixed Models (GAMM) analyses showed that both groups of speakers produced a clearly diphthongal /ou/, which contrasts with previous auditory-based accounts that /ou/ in Taiwan Mandarin may be monophthongal. The two dialects, however, had rather different phonetic realizations: Taiwan Mandarin had a significantly lower realization for the nucleus of /ou/ than its Beijing counterpart; Taiwan Mandarin also had a significantly more fronted realization for the offglide than Beijing Mandarin. The articulatory patterns mostly corresponded to the acoustic results, in that while tongue dorsum raising was found for all speakers in this study, an additional tongue dorsum fronting gesture was observed for the majority of the Taiwan Mandarin speakers. Together, the results suggest that the less studied dialectal variation in Mandarin vowels may be a promising line of investigation, particularly with parallel acoustic and articulatory data collection.

The Dictionarium Latino Nankinense and Nanjing Guanhua

Adopting different points of view, this article analyzes a manuscript recently discovered in the Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, the Dictionarium Latino Nankinense juxta Materiarum ordinem dispositum, handwritten by the French Jesuit missionary Benjamin Brueyre. It focuses in particular on the discovery’s potential importance for the study of Qing dynasty Nanjing Mandarin, while referencing its implications on the cross-cultural interactions between China and Europe. After an introduction presenting other fundamental texts compiled in Nanjing Mandarin by Western missionaries and scholars, the first section details the most commonly accepted grammatical theoretical framework for distinguishing Beijing Mandarin and Nanjing Mandarin. In the second section, the author presents the manuscript in detail, describing its purpose, its possible sources, and some of its linguistic peculiarities, particularly the lexicological, lexicographical, and grammatical features, as well as some illustrative examples of cross-cultural translations. Finally, in the third section, using the framework presented in the first, the author shows that the Dictionarium is a text mixing linguistic features from different varieties of Mandarin. As highlighted by the approach of missionary linguistics, the manuscript is a rare and important record of lexicological, lexicographical, grammatical, and romanization features of late Qing dynasty Chinese and deserves further research from both historical linguistic and cross-cultural perspectives.

Acoustic Study of Tone 3 Sandhi in Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin

Studies on Mandarin tone sandhi have focused on Beijing Mandarin. Taiwan has been politically separated from mainland China since 1949, but it is not known if tone sandhi in Taiwan Mandarin displays different patterns or characteristics. However, there has been no comparative study to investigate if Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin display the same tone sandhi pattern. This study aims to fill this gap by comparing Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin through a productive experiment to examine acoustic differences between sandhied tone 3 and lexical tone 2. The results indicate that tone 3 sandhi among Mandarin dialects is not a homogeneous category, but displays a graded phenomenon of a categorical change and tonal reduction. The experimental evidence shows that acoustic difference between sandhied tone 3 and lexical tone 2 is larger in Beijing Mandarin than that in Taiwan Mandarin. Gender effects are also detected and acoustic difference in female samples is consistently larger than that in male samples across Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin. The findings suggest that the third tone sandhi in Beijing Mandarin is more like a categorical change (i.e., changed to lexical tone 2) whereas the sandhi in Taiwan Mandarin is more like a tonal reduction.

Indirect tone-prominence interaction in Kunming tone sandhi

Abstract Kunming exhibits a special kind of interaction between tone and prominence whereby the prosodic headedness is shown to play an indirect role in tone sandhi. Due to higher-ranked tonal faithfulness constraints, lower tones, which are universally unfavored in the head position, do not change to higher tones, and higher tones, which are universally unfavored in the non-head position, do not change to lower tones. Nonetheless, though the unfavored tone-(non-)head correlation does not directly trigger tone sandhi, it indirectly decides whether tone sandhi will take place. Falling tones, inter-syllabic tone segment disagreement, and tonal combinations with identical contours are marked tonal structures in the language. But not all these structures result in tone sandhi. The penalization of these structures is tied to an unfavored tone-(non-)head correlation; only when an undesired tone-(non-)head correlation is involved are the marked tonal structures penalized. The indirect tone-(non-)head interaction observed in Kunming is special but not unique to the language as a similar correlation is found in the Chinese dialects of Dongshi Hakka and Beijing Mandarin.

Coupling tonetics and perceptual attunement: The psychophysics of lexical tone contrast salience

As with the coupling phonetics and psycholinguistics by such luminaries as Sereno and Jongman, we couple (a) discrepant cross-lab results in infant lexical tone perceptual attunement studies and (b) an adult cross-language lexical tone perception study. Three trajectories of lexical tone perception over infants’ first year have been found over labs, in which infants from differing language backgrounds have been tested with differing stimulus materials, viz., (i) Incremental (Singh’s lab—Singaporean Mandarin vs Singaporean English language background infants, Singaporean Mandarin tone contrasts; Tsao’s lab-Taiwanese and English language infants, Taiwanese Mandarin contrasts); (ii) Decremental (Burnham’s lab—Australian English but not for Cantonese or Mandarin language infants, Thai contrasts; Yeung/Werker’s lab—American English but not for Mandarin and Cantonese language infants, Cantonese contrasts); and (iii) U-shaped (Kager’s lab—Dutch infants, Mainland Mandarin contrasts). To investigate these discrepancies, we tested discrimination of Singaporean Mandarin, Beijing Mandarin, Hong Kong Cantonese, and Bangkok Thai tone contrasts by Singaporean Mandarin, Beijing Mandarin, Hong Kong Cantonese, Bangkok Thai, and Sydney Australian English listeners. Despite some discrepancies, this coupling revealed some congruences between psychophysical level of difficulty of tone contrasts within and between languages in the adult study, and the different developmental trajectories in the infant studies.

Horizontal Transmission and the Merge of Jian and Tuan Sounds in Beijing Mandarin in Qing Dynasty (in Chinese)

By the late Ming Dynasty(1602), the Beijing dialect of the Chinese language had witnessed the phenomenon of palatalization in the fine sounds of jian group and jing group, but the two kinds of sounds, called respectively tuan sounds and jian sounds today, were still entirely different from each other. From the same period when the primary edition of Jiu Manzhou Dang (Government archive of the early Manchu/Manzhou) [MG 1607–1636], we can see that the Manchus in the Northeast of China confused the two kinds of sounds at the beginning of learning Chinese language, which is described as the merge of jian and tuan sounds. After the entry of Manchus (1644), characterized by the merge of jian and tuan sounds, the imperfect Chinese language spoken by Manchus entered the inner city of Beijing and formed a contrast with the traditional Chinese language spoken by the Han people in the outer city of Beijing. Due to the implementation of the Manchu as the national language ( guoyu ) in the early Qing dynasty, the language spoken by Manchus in the inner city affected the language spoken by the Han people in the outer city through education. About 100 years later (1743–1810), in the spoken Chinese of the Han people in the outer city, the phenomenon of merging jian and tuan sounds appeared first only in some words, and then finally took over completely. This shows that the phenomenon of merging jian and tuan sounds in the Beijing dialect of the Qing dynasty is a result of the of linguistic features from the Manchus in the inner city to the Han people in the outer city. The so-called horizontal transmission is the mutual effect between different languages when they contact with each other. The history of the Beijing dialect of the Qing dynasty is a history of the Manchus in the inner city abandoning the Manchu language, which was first converted imperfectly into the Chinese language and then finally merged with the spoken Chinese of the Han people in the outer city. In this process, on account of the special social status of the Manchus in the inner city, their spoken Chinese with the merge jian and tuan sounds affected that of the Han people in the outer city, and eventually prompted the same merge of two sounds of jian and tuan sounds among the latter, just as what had happened to the Manchus.

Discussion on the Early History of the Formation of Beijing Mandarin

Beijing Mandarin is more than a thousand year ago Yan Yan dialect, based on the integration of the Central Plains Han and northern ethnic minority language components gradually formed. Beijing Mandarin before the formal formation of a long period of gestation, revealing the Sui and Tang dynasties before the formation of the Beijing Mandarin area early human history, for the understanding of Beijing Mandarin language situation is very important.

A corpus based analysis of lexical richness of Beijing Mandarin speakers: variable identification and model construction

This work concerns the lexical richness of Beijing Mandarin speakers measured by entropy. The data used for the study are the Beijing Mandarin Spoken Corpora, a conversational and spontaneous speech corpus of contemporary Beijing Mandarin speakers. Based on the sociovariational linguistic hypotheses and data analysis, the study attempts to identify and explain the key demographical and socioeconomic parameters that impact the entropy of each subject’s spoken texts. Both one-dimensional and multi-dimensional statistical models are proposed to quantify the relationships between the pertinent measure of lexical richness and the prominent indicative variables, including age, level of education, and profession premium. A multi-dimensional nonlinear model encompassing these findings is designed and calibrated with statistical estimation methods. Possible future directions and applications in relevant field of applied linguistics are provided.

Prosodic realization of focus in American English by Beijing Mandarin learners

In addition to an increase of duration, F0 and intensity in phonetically realizing focus, post-focus compression (PFC) of F0 and intensity has been found in many languages, including American English and Beijing Mandarin. Recent studies found that PFC did not easily transfer from language to language (Wu and Chung, 2011); however, language experience impacted the realization of PFC (Chen et al., 2012). The effect of length of residence (LOR) in an L2-speaking environment on L2 pronunciation accuracy remains controversial (Piske, 2007). The current study examined English focus production of Beijing Mandarin learners, who were college freshmen, residing in the United States for 3 to 6 months, and college seniors for 3.5 to 4 years. Compared to the control group, both learner groups produced comparable patterns of duration change; the freshman group did not present significant PFC of F0 and intensity in either initial-focus or medial-focus condition; the senior group presented a native-like PFC in the initial-focus condition and an intermediate pattern of PFC among the three groups in the medial-focus condition. The preliminary results indicate that Beijing Mandarin learners with long LOR in the US produced more native-like prosodic focus in English than those with short LOR in the United States.

Performance-Intensity Functions of Mandarin Word Recognition Tests in Noise: Test Dialect and Listener Language Effects

This study established the performance-intensity function for Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin bisyllabic word recognition tests in noise in native speakers of Wu Chinese. Effects of the test dialect and listeners' first language on psychometric variables (i.e., slope and 50%-correct threshold) were analyzed. Thirty-two normal-hearing Wu-speaking adults who used Mandarin since early childhood were compared to 16 native Mandarin-speaking adults. Both Beijing and Taiwan bisyllabic word recognition tests were presented at 8 signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) in 4-dB steps (-12 dB to +16 dB). At each SNR, a half list (25 words) was presented in speech-spectrum noise to listeners' right ear. The order of the test, SNR, and half list was randomized across listeners. Listeners responded orally and in writing. Overall, the Wu-speaking listeners performed comparably to the Mandarin-speaking listeners on both tests. Compared to the Taiwan test, the Beijing test yielded a significantly lower threshold for both the Mandarin- and Wu-speaking listeners, as well as a significantly steeper slope for the Wu-speaking listeners. Both Mandarin tests can be used to evaluate Wu-speaking listeners. Of the 2, the Taiwan Mandarin test results in more comparable functions across listener groups. Differences in the performance-intensity function between listener groups and between tests indicate a first language and dialectal effect, respectively.

Prosodic focus with and without post-focus compression: A typological divide within the same language family?

There is increasing evidence that many languages encode prosodic focus not only with phonetic variations in the focused component itself, but also with a reduction of pitch range and intensity of the post-focus components, a strategy known as post-focus compression (PFC). However, evidence is also emerging that in many other languages prosodic encoding of focus is markedly different, suggesting that PFC might be related to factors such as the presence of lexical tone, stress or the availability of morphosyntactic means of signaling focus. The current study investigated the production and perception of f ocus in Taiwanese, Taiwan Mandarin and Beijing Mandarin, three languages/dialects that are all tonal and that have similar morphosyntactic means for indicating focus. Results showed clear evidence of PFC in Beijing Mandarin but lack of it in Taiwanese and Taiwan Mandarin, suggesting that PFC is independent of the factors mentioned above. Most interestingly, Taiwan Mandarin seems to have lost PFC due to close contact with Taiwanese despite its effectiveness as demonstrated by the perceptual experiment. The new findings, taken together with other recent finding about prosodic focus, seem to suggest that PFC is a “hard-to-evolve” prosodic feature that may have a single historical origin. Thus there is a need for large scale experimental research to explore the crosslinguistic distribution of PFC, so as to broaden our understanding of not only prosodic typology, but also language contact, bilingualism and language evolution in general.

Gĕi 'give' in Beijing and beyond 1

This article focuses on the various uses of gĕi 'give', as attested in a corpus of spoken Beijing Mandarin collected by the author. These uses are compared to those in earlier attestations of Beijing Mandarin from the end of the Qing, and to those in Greater Beijing Mandarin and in the Ji-Lŭ Mandarin dialects. The uses of gĕi in the corpus are shown to be consistent with those found in these two dialect groups, where the primary function of gei is that of indirect object marking and where, in contrast to Standard Mandarin, gei is not additionally used as an agent marker or a direct object marker. Exceptions to this pattern in the corpus are explained as a recent development arisen through reanalysis.

The Phonological Representation of Taiwan Mandarin Vowels: A Psycholinguistic Study

One of the fundamental goals of every phonological theory is to account for the nature of the basic units of speech sounds, and the relationships between these units and their contextual variants. This relationship is equally crucial to phonological theory whether it is called `phonemes and allophones', `underlying and surface forms', or `input and output'. However, purely structural analyses of phonological systems can often produce several hypotheses regarding the phonemic inventory and its surface reflexes in any particular language, all of which are supportable by the contrast and alternation patterns of the language. In this paper we look at four such hypotheses regarding the underlying vowel system of Mandarin, all based on Beijing Mandarin: the six-vowel system of C. Cheng (1973), the five-vowel systems of R. Cheng (1966) and of Lin (1989), and the four-vowel system of Wu (1994). We then present distributional, phonetic, and psycholinguistic evidence (the latter based on a corpus of 238 syntagmatic speech errors or `slips of the tongue' involving vowels) that the vowel system of the dialect of Mandarin currently spoken in Taiwan cannot be accounted for by any of these hypotheses. We then propose a new 5-vowel system for Taiwan Mandarin, based on the distributional, phonetic, and especially the psycholinguistic facts. We conclude that phonological theories which are compatible with psycholinguistic evidence such as the data presented here are those most likely to be modeling the actual cognitive representations and processes of real speakers.