Since dental-retroflex fricative contrast is not consistently maintained in many southern dialects of Chinese, native speakers of these dialects may not accurately produce the Mandarin retroflex fricative /ʂ/. Consequently, /ʂa/ may be realized as [sa] (Duanmu, 2007). This study investigated the variation of the retroflex fricative /ʂ/ in a Chinese Mandarin speech corpus (DataTang, 2018). The corpus contains 200 hours of recordings of 600 speakers from different dialectal regions in China. Each recording was aligned at the phone level using Montreal Forced Aligner. The center of gravity of the acoustic energy (COG) of the target sounds was extracted using Christian DiCanio’s Praat script. For statistical analysis, the generalized additive mixed-effects model (GAMM) was used. COG was the response variable. The following vowel’s height, tone, and gender were factorial predictors. To evaluate the geographic effect, we used tensor product smooths by fricatives with the longitude and latitude of each speaker’s birthplace (Chuang et al., 2021). Our results suggested a more dental-like realization of the retroflex for speakers from southern China and significant effects of the following vowel’s height and gender in the realization of Mandarin retroflex fricative.

By conducting an apparent-time analysis of the OFROM corpus collected in Francophone Switzerland, this study examined the use of genre as discourse marker in the speech of 306 French L1 speakers. First, we examined the effect of extralinguistic factors on the discursive use of genre. The logistic mixed-effects regression analysis results revealed that the emerging use of genre is indeed an ongoing change led by female speakers in Swiss French. This use was favored by monolinguals in Francophone Swiss. Second, we examined the vowel reduction of the DM genre in the corpus. Our results revealed that speakers who received only a high school education favor the vowel reduction in the DM genre the most. Given the high percentage of phonological reduction in the DM genre, we believe that the grammaticalization of this particle has reached its advanced stage in Swiss French. Compared to previous findings on the emerging use of genre in Hexagonal French, we suggested that the grammaticalization of the particle genre in Swiss French may be independent of that in Hexagonal French. The grammaticalization in Swiss French was much more advanced than in Hexagonal French. This study supplied comparable results on the grammaticalization of the same particle in two different Francophone countries.

It seems that the French native speakers do not always use donc as argumentative connectors in oral French. In fact, its use as discourse markers has been addressed by many researchers in linguistics. To avoid the overlaps between different categories of functions established by other scholars, we propose to distinguish only two types of donc: the argumentative donc and the discursive donc. This paper exploited the discursive use of the French particle donc in the oral production of Chinese L1 speakers of French in France. We found that donc could have the exemplification function in non-native speech, which was not reported in native speakers’ speech. Meanwhile, from the sociolinguistic perspective, we also investigated how some social factors influence its use in nonnative speakers’ speech. Among different extralinguistic factors examined in this article, only the extracurricular contact with native speakers of French was proved to be statistically significant.

Based on sociolinguistic data collected from 29 Chinese L1 speakers of English in the US, this article investigated the quotative markers used by non-native speakers in their direct speech reporting. By conducting regression analysis, both linguistic factors (the tense of the verb, the subject pronouns, the mimetic status of the quotation, the content of the quotation, and the presence of discourse markers) and extralinguistic factors (gender, extracurricular contact with native speakers, and length of stay in the target country) were examined and further discussed. Our results revealed that factors such as the content of the quotation, the tense of the verb, and the presence of other discourse markers significantly influence the choice of quotative markers in non-native speech. We demonstrated that non-native speakers use a variety of quotative verbs in their direct speech reporting. Nonetheless, because of L1 impact, they rely primarily on the dominant form say. We also noticed that while non-native speakers might not be accurate in their words when reporting direct speech, they use prosodic cues to make their storytelling more convincing and authentic.

Teacher Transition into Innovative Learning Environments: A Global Perspective, edited by Wesley Imms and Thomas Kvan Springer, 2021. 334pp, $99.00 (Paperback) Open Access (eBook). ISBN 9789811574962.