No abstract

While the sociolinguistic variable is often deemed the carrier of social meaning, recent work reveals that the strength of social meaning can interact with linguistic environments. This study provides additional evidence that the same sets of variants can index drastically different social meanings across linguistic environments. Specifically, we present two cases of linguistic stylization in Taiwanese singer Jay Chou's performance in different genres: the ‘Chinese Flavor’ ballad and hip hop. Focusing on two socially salient variables in Mandarin—rhotacization and retroflex sibilants—we argue that while in both cases, Chou adopts variants associated with standard and mainland Mandarin, they index different social meanings. The conforming linguistic use in the ‘Chinese Flavor’ ballad indexes a sense of tradition, whereas the hypercorrected forms in the hip-hop song construct an unconventional stance. The study also addresses the connections between linguistic and non-linguistic stylizations and calls for more research on the multimodal construction of style. (Social meaning, linguistic constraint, multimodal, high performance, Mandarin)*

While variationist literature on sound change has mostly focused on chain shifts and mergers, much less is written about splits (Labov, 1994, 2010). Previous literature shows that the acquisition of splits is unlikely unless motivated by social factors (Labov, 1994). The current study presents an apparent time analysis on the development of two phonemic splits, the initial /s/-/ʂ/ contrast and the initial /ɻ/-/l/ contrast, in Xiamen Mandarin, a contact variety of Putonghua, the official language in China. Statistical results showed similar patterns for both variables: younger speakers and female speakers are leading the change; the distinction between two phonemes are more distinct in wordlist than in the sociolinguistic interview. By examining the sociolinguistic situation in Xiamen, the paper discusses two potential factors that have led to these sound changes: the regional campaign for Putonghua and the emphasis of Pinyin, a phonetically-based orthography, in the education system.

Articulatory impairment, including consonant imprecision, has been widely studied in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). However, acoustic investigation of articulatory impairment in Cantonese speakers with PD has been limited. The purpose of this study was to investigate the acoustic characteristics of plosives production in Cantonese speakers with PD. The participants comprised 17 Cantonese speakers with PD and 17 age- and gender-matched healthy controls (HC). Six Cantonese plosives /p, ph, t, th, k, kh/ followed by the vowel /a/ were produced at high-level tone (T1) in the context of word and sentence. All speech samples produced by PD patients were further divided into two subgroups: normal plosive production (PD-NP) and spirantized plosive production (PD-SP). Higher intensity ratio, shorter VOT and shorter closure duration during plosive production were found in both PD-NP and PD-SP subgroups when compared to the HC group. In addition, aspiration and context did affect the intensity ratio, VOT and closure duration while place of articulation only affected the VOT. Furthermore, it was found that the most commonly misarticulated plosives in Cantonese speakers with PD were bilabial stops, followed by alveolar and velar stops. This finding of spirantization of plosives is in agreement with previous studies.