Zhangzhou Implosives and Their Variations

ACL-IJCNLP 2021 Submission ***. Confidential review Copy. DO NOT DISTRIBUTE. 1 000 001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 009 010 011 012 013 014 015 016 017 018 019 020 021 022 023 024 025 026 027 028 029 030 031 032 033 034 035 036 037 038 039 040 041 042 043 044 045 046 047 048 049 Abstract As a typologically rare phenomenon, the airstream mechanism of glottalic ingressive is employed phonemically in Zhangzhou Southern Min, a Sinitic dialect spoken in Southern China. Their realisations are observed to be highly diverse, with 11 phonetic variants ([ɓ, ɗ, ɠ, m, n, ŋ, β, lʷ, ɣʷ, ɗ̪ , ɠʲ]) that can be derived from 3 implosives (/ɓ, ɗ, ɠ/). Such dynamic allophonic variation occurs as a consequence of regressive impacts from subsequent nasal [Ṽ], labial-velar [u, w], and palatal [i, j] segments. Several phonetic processes can be generalized, comprising labialisation, nasalisation, lenition, laminalisation, dentalisation and palatalization, which trigger alternation on the airstream mechanism, change the manner of articulation or place of articulation, and result in diverse outputs that can be characterized using phonological rules. This study directly strengthens our understanding of the phonology and phonetics of implosives in this dialect while contributing convincing empirical data to the typology of phonation as a special linguistic phenomenon in natural languages. It also sheds important light on how human languages can be encoded in a complicated way far beyond our general assumptions and expectation. Keywords: Implosives, allophonic variation, phonological rule, Zhangzhou 1 Introduction Human languages exploit various dimensions to characterise consonants, which comprise place of articulation, manner of articulation, nasality, laterality, phonation, voicing status of the glottis, aspiration, and airstream mechanism, among others (Bickford & Floyd, 2006). Each dimension can further classify consonants into several different sub-categories. For example, the airstream mechanism can group consonants into pulmonic egressive, glottalic egressive (ejective), glottalic ingressive (implosive), and velaric ingressive (click), which are lexically observed around the world, depending on where the airstream is initiated, lungs, glottis, or tongue, and in which direction the airstream flows, outward or inward (Bickford & Floyd, 2006). The Sinitic dialect of Zhangzhou Southern Min, spoken in the South Fujian province of Mainland China, is found to employ two types of airstream mechanisms in its consonantal system. In addition to the general type of pulmonic egressive, three implosive sounds (/ɓ, ɗ, ɠ/) are synchronically used to distinguish lexical items However, it may be because of their special mechanism that is only found in 13% of the world’s languages, and the continuous motion of organ apparatus in speech production, the realisations of implosive phonemes are observed to be highly diverse, with eleven variants being derived at the surface level, covering five different places of articulation, and four types of the manner of articulation, as shown in Table 1. Zhangzhou Implosives and Their Variations Yishan Huang, Gwendolyn Hyslop Linguistics Department University of Sydney yishan.huang@sydney.edu.au; Gwendolyn.hyslop@sydney.edu.au ACL-IJCNLP 2021 Submission ***. Confidential review Copy. DO NOT DISTRIBUTE. 2 Table 1: Phonetic variants of …

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