This dissertation provides a comprehensive description of the tonal and intonational phonology of Lhasa Tibetan (LT) in the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. It is based on recorded data elicited from members of the Tibetan-Canadian community in Ottawa and Toronto.
The first two chapters of the dissertation contain background information about LT, a summary of previous research on LT tones and intonation, and an overview of the theoretical framework and conceptual tools used in the rest of the dissertation.
The third chapter deals with word tonology. I establish that the prosodic structure of LT brings evidence for four main constituents at or below the word level: a) the mora encodes vowel length contrasts, b) the syllable is the tone-bearing unit (TBU), c) the prosodic word, which is maximally binary, delimits the application of most tonal processes, and d) the prosodic word group, which matches grammatical words, is the domain of downstep. This prosodic structure provides evidence against the universality of the Prosodic Hierarchy (Selkirk, 2002; Nespor and Vogel, 2007) in that it has no phonological phrase, but has two word-level constituents. I then argue that LT has three lexical tones (H, LH, and L) – L being limited to some suffixes – and propose that these lexical tones are subject to tone rules applying within the prosodic word and the prosodic word group. These tone rules are similar to those proposed by Duanmu (1992), but have been improved to accurately predict the tone patterns of long polysyllabic words. Based on phonetic evidence, I also come to the conclusion that LT no longer has stress, and that the stress pattern found in other Bodic varieties has been reinterpreted as a part of the tonal system.
The fourth chapter analyses phrasal prosody. I argue that LT forms intonational phrases around clauses and marks them with final lengthening, pitch reset, and a limited set of boundary tones (H% and L%). Although communicative functions and information structure are mostly realized by means of final particles and morphosyntactic devices in LT, I show that boundary tones, focal tones, and deaccenting interact with word tones to form complex melodic patterns.
In the fifth chapter, I present a phonologically-based F0 synthesis model to verify the adequacy of the proposed Autosegmental-Metrical model of LT. This F0 synthesis model consists of three main components: a) the tonal targets de ned in previous chapters, b) an F0 interpolation component based on the PENTA model (Xu, 2004), and c) an evaluation component allowing a comparison of the F0 contours of real LT utterances with resynthesized F0 contours of the same utterances. The F0 synthesis model is able to generate F0 contours that approximate the F0 contours of real LT recordings, suggesting that the proposed phonological model adequately captures the overall tonal and intonational phonology of LT.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/37294 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Lim, Keh Sheng |
| Contributors | Brunelle, Marc |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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