This thesis describes the phonology of present-day Cantonese. In addition to tone, onset and rime, the thesis also covers realization, variation, casual speech and intonation. A separate chapter considers the syllable as a whole. With sympathetic understanding, the thesis reviews previous work on the subject. In doing so, it tries to provide principled answers to the questions how and why Cantonese phonologies differ. In its own treatment of the subject, it benefits from indigenous Chinese phonology, classical phonemics, Firthian prosodic phonology, SPE phonology, and autosegmental phonology, as well as European structuralism, while dismissing the time-honoured principle of unilinear phoneme-size segmentation as inappropriate for Cantonese. The mora is introduced into the organization of Cantonese sounds. The descriptive device of autosegmental phonology enables us to consider morae as "autosegments", thereby capturing a number of regularities which are otherwise difficult to characterize elegantly. Another innovation in the thesis is the idea of "coercion", a process whereby uncanonical phonetic forms, which arise as the output of casual speech processes, are replaced by canonical forms. The mora, coercion, and autosegmental representations together account for a good deal of lower-level regularities, especially in casual, connected speech. They also contribute to understanding the discrepancies among different phonologies of Cantonese. By enabling a dynamic and holistic view of the organization of Cantonese sounds, they cast light on the static and fragmentary nature of many prevailing views on the subject.

Inspired by Lin and Huang’s (2009) rhythmic study of Chinese dialects, this study examines speech rhythm of 21 Chinese dialects from three perspectives, timing, melody, and phonological structure. The 21 dialects belong to four major groups of Chinese and their respective sub-groups. The four major groups are Mandarin, Wu, Min, and Cantonese. Nine duration-based and four pitch-based metrics are used to quantify timing and melody, respectively. Four phonological structure-based metrics are used to explore the relationships between syllable structure and timing and between tone structure and melody. All the metrics are paired up according to five categories, duration-only, pitch-only, duration-pitch, duration-syllable, pitch-tone, and each pair is subject to a correlation analysis. Then timing and melody patterns of the Chinese dialects are determined by correlation patterns of relevant metric pairs. The main findings of this study are as follows: 1) Timing and melody patterns of the Chinese dialects are far from homogenous across major groups and melody patterns are more distinct than timing patterns; 2) No single metric pair is able to quantify speech rhythm consistently for all the Chinese dialects; nonetheless, pitch-based metric pairs fare better than duration-based ones; 3) Syllable-timedness and melodiousness are correlated positively for all the major groups except for Wu; 4) Phonological structure plays little role in shaping timing and melody patterns of most Chinese dialects. The above findings are both expected and unexpected. They are expected in the sense that rhythmic perception invovles multiple acoustic cues, so it comes as no surprise that not all rhythmic metrics are successful in quantifying Chinese rhythm. They are unexpected for the reason that all the metrics are developed based more or less on phonological structure, yet the rhythmic patterns they reveal do not correspond to the structure affinity or group membership of the Chinese dialects. Overall, the findings suggest that pitch is a more import cue than duration to Chinese rhythm. As the first study of Chinese rhythm across multiple dialects and from different perspectives, this study not only lays a methodological foundation for future research but also contributes to our in-depth understanding of Chinese dialects. / Graduate / 0290 / yali@uvic.ca

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