The effect of syllable lengthening: On the duration of syllable nucleus and coda in Cantonese
粤语音节延长对韵腹韵尾时长的影响
Kwan hin Cheung 张群显; Ling Zhang 张凌

Abstract 摘要
Syllable isochrony in general and motivated syllable lengthening at times in Cantonese are no contradiction; in fact they corroborate each other. Signaling of sentence stress is one of the functions that syllable lengthening fulfils in Cantonese. This paper compares the duration structures of stressed (therefore lengthened) and non-stressed syllables, so as to see the effect of syllable lengthening on the duration of the syllable nucleus (V) vis-a-vis that of the coda (Cd). The paper is based on an experiment with two informants, one male (M) and one female (F). The experiment has two parts. Part 1 looks at how the trochaic (long V, short Cd) rimes and iambic (short V, long Cd) rimes behave, respectively, across the three types of rimes classified according to manner of articulation of coda, namely, vowel vs. nasal vs. stop. The results show that, with the exception of iambic rimes with stop coda, all the other five types of V-Cd configuration exhibit the pattern of putting the burden of lengthening mainly on the part (V or Cd) that has the “long” attribute. Iambic rimes with stop coda, on the other hand, put that burden mainly on the V, which originally has the “short” attribute. Part 2 is focused on rimes with stop coda, which show anomaly in Part 1. The rimes [aːt] and [ɐt] (representing trochee and iamb respectively) combine with different following onsets exhaustively to give a larger sample. The results corroborate the pattern exhibited in Part 1 as far as F is concerned. As for M, the results are somewhat mixed. While the majority cases are compatible with F, the remainder cases (applicable to trochaic and iambic rimes alike) are disparate and defy clear pattern abstraction. The pattern that F exhibits throughout and M exhibits in the majority of cases corroborates our observation of the general behavior of native speakers of Cantonese. One can assume that this is the normal behavior of native Cantonese speakers. In this behavior, the singular pattern applicable to iambic rimes with stop coda, namely that it is mainly the V with the “short” attribute that is lengthened to achieve syllable lengthening, can be explained by the fact that a stop coda in Cantonese typically assumes a period of time without audible phonetic signal, and thus does not lend itself to lengthening.

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