| الوصف: |
This dissertation is a phonetic and phonological investigation of rhotic sounds in Mandarin Chinese. According to previous descriptions, there are two rhotics in Mandarin Chinese, a syllable-initial consonantal variant and vocalic rhotics derived through a morphological process of er-suffixation. The exact phonetic nature of these sounds has been debated: previous studies diverge especially in how they classify the place and manner of articulation of the syllable-initial variant. The present study contributes to this debate through original articulatory and acoustic data from an experiment designed to illuminate the nature of /r/-allophony in Mandarin. Ultrasound data from eighteen speakers from Beijing delivers a number of novel findings concerning the rhotic realisation in Mandarin. The syllable-initial rhotic is found to vary between a post-alveolar fricative and a retroflex approximant, depending on the speaker. The retroflex approximant variant is previously unreported, but it is robustly present in 8 out of 18 speakers in this study. The syllable-final variant is confirmed to be a rhotic vowel, produced with either a retroflex (tip-up) or a bunched (tip-down) lingual gesture. This variation is analysed in terms of a clear-dark opposition, as previously proposed for liquids, such as English /l/. A larger theoretical issue underpinning the present work concerns the phonological [(+)rhotic] status of the sounds under investigation. The feature [(+)rhotic] is not well defined, largely due to considerable phonetic variation attested cross-linguistically in rhotics. Given this, and given that the putative rhotics in Mandarin also show a lot of variation, two questions arise: 1) Do the syllable-initial and syllable-final rhotic in Mandarin form a natural class? 2) How best to express the phonological representation of these sounds? Three lines of evidence are considered in the attempt to address these questions. The diachronic development of the different rhotics is reconstructed, highlighting that the syllable-initial and syllable-final rhotic do not share a common diachronic predecessor. However, acoustic data shows some phonetic invariance in present-day Mandarin rhotic sounds. The source of this invariance is the relatively stable difference between F3-F2, one of the better-known acoustic correlates of rhoticity. The [(+)rhotic] status of these sounds is confirmed through an experiment, which tests the behaviour of the different rhotics in external sandhi. It is shown that the feature [(+)rhotic] is phonologically active in Mandarin, because it participates in a categorical assimilation process when a syllable- final rhotic is followed by a syllable-initial one. The case of Mandarin rhotics highlights that phonology has a crucial role to play in explaining and detecting rhotic identity, but this process also crucially involves a careful consideration of the relevant phonetic facts. |