Corpus-based Comparison of Verbs of Separation “Qie” and “Ge”

A new look at Pattani Malay Initial Geminates: a statistical and machine learning approach Francesco Burroni Sireemas Maspong Department of Linguistics and Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science Program Southeast Asia Program Cornell University Cornell University 203 Morrill Hall, 203 Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY, USA 14850 Ithaca, NY, USA 14850 fb279@cornell.edu sm2627@cornell.edu Pittayawat Pittayaporn Pimthip Kochaiyaphum Department of Linguistics and Department of Linguistics and Southeast Asian Linguistics Research Unit Southeast Asian Linguistics Research Unit Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University Phayathai Road, Pathumwan, Phayathai Road, Pathumwan, Bangkok, Thailand 10330 Bangkok, Thailand 10330 pittayawat.p@chula.ac.th pimthip.ko@student.ac.th Abstract In this paper, we present a statistical and machine learning approach to the acoustic discrimination of a cross-linguistically unusual phonological contrast, initial geminates vs. singletons in Pattani Malay. We show that the only statistically significant difference between geminates and singletons is the duration of the consonant itself. No differences in F0 and intensity were observed on the following vowel, contra earlier reports. We further investigated the robustness of this contrast using linear discriminant analysis. Results show that discrimination is above chance, but poor (~62%). The large overlap between the two categories may be partly due to the naturalistic nature of our speech samples. However, we also found that the contrast is neutralized in some minimal pairs. This merger is surprising since initial geminates are often the sole realization of lexical and morphosyntactic contrasts. We suggest that the singleton/initial geminate contrast is now best characterized as a marginal contrast. We hypothesize that this marginally contrastive status may be the result of an on-going sound change, perhaps connected with the more modest role that initial geminates play in Pattani Malay morphophonological alternations. 1 Introduction Pattani Malay (PM), an Austronesian language spoken in Southern Thailand (Uthai 2011), exhibits a cross-linguistically unusual phonological ‘length’ contrast for all word-initial consonants, e.g., [matɔ] ‘eye’ vs [mːatɔ] ‘jewelry’. The long forms of initial consonants, usually termed initial geminates (IGs), have been reported to differ from singletons along multiple acoustic dimensions. With regards to duration, PM IGs have been reported to be, on average, three times longer than their singleton counterparts (Abramson 1987). Durational differences are hardly a surprising finding since closure duration is usually considered the most reliable acoustic correlate of phonological length cross-linguistically (Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996). If previous work is representative, however, the IG/singleton duration ratio of 3:1 in PM would be on the extreme side of the spectrum (Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996). Interestingly, duration is not the only cue that distinguishes IGs from singletons in PM. IGs have been reported to produce acoustic effects on the following vowel as well. In particular, previous research has reported that vowels following IGs display longer duration, higher fundamental frequency (F0), and higher intensity (Abramson 1987; Abramson 1998; Phuengnoi 2010). These F0 and intensity cues alone have been shown to be reliable enough for native speakers to correctly identify IGs vs singleton onsets; even in environments where durational cues are ambiguous, such as in absolute utterance-initial position where closure …

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