Changing against tone merging trends in community? The case of C. Y. Leung

Changing against tone merging trends in community? The case of C. Y. Leung Ziqi Chen Yao Yao The Hong Kong Polytechnic University/ Hung Hom, Hong Kong The Hong Kong Polytechnic University/ Hung Hom, Hong Kong scarlett.chen@connect.polyu.hk Alan C. L. Yu University of Chicago/ Chicago, IL, US ctyao.yao@polyu.edu.hk aclyu@uchicago.edu Abstract Compared to the voluminous literature of sound change and variation across speakers and generations, much less is understood about change and variation within individuals across the lifespan. In this paper, we present a study of the Cantonese speech of a public figure, Mr. Chun-ying Leung (1954-), recorded over a span of three decades (1984-2013), which coincides with a period when multiple sound changes were in progress in Hong Kong Cantonese, including the merging of tones. Assisted with automatic segmentation and annotation, 13,389 tokens representing 878 unique characters with unchecked tones were measured for F0. Our results show that instead of merging tones, Leung made increasingly greater distinction in the past three decades between potential tone- merging targets, exhibiting sound changes in the opposite directions of the ongoing changes in the community. 1 Introduction Compared to the voluminous literature of sound change and variation across speakers and generations, much less is understood about change and variation within individuals across the lifespan. A few panel studies (e.g. Sankoff & Blondeau, 2007) followed groups of adult speakers for decades, and found that while the majority of the speakers show stability of pronunciation over the years, a minority of speakers do change, especially when the sound change takes on social meanings. Another line of studies tracked the speech of eminent individuals over a long stretch of time. Harrington and colleagues (Harrington, Palethorpe & Watson, 2000) showed significant changes in Queen Elizabeth II’s vowels across her lifespan, in a direction consistent with the changes in progress in the broader language community. Similar studies of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Shapp, LaFave, & Singler, 2014) and Noam Chomsky (Kwon, 2018) also found significant changes across the lifespan. Past apparent time studies reported Cantonese sound changes in progress, tone merging as one type of them (Mok, Zuo, & Wong, 2013; To, Mcleod, & Cheung, 2015). The studies suggested the merging of the tones in HKC: originally 6 tones, merging observed between low rising T2 and high rising T5, and among mid-level T3, low- Figure 1. F0 contours for HKC tones produced on the syllable [ji] by a male (Francis, Ciocca, Ma, & Fenn, 2008) PACLIC 32 107 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation Hong Kong, 1-3 December 2018 Copyright 2018 by the authors level T6, and low-falling T4 (Mok et al., 2013). The studies used synchronic variations to represent diachronic changes, based on the apparent time hypothesis that one’s language acquired in childhood would remain stable in adulthood (Labov, 1999, p. 45). It was also assumed that the speech of an adult should record the communal trends of the period when he was a child; and thus, by collecting data across age groups, researchers could compare linguistic …

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