This paper examines the newly developed tones in Cantonese English, with a particular interest in the tones spanning across syllables. It attempts to provide phonetic evidence for the tone spans and demonstrate the association of tones to syllables. Audio-recording data elicited from six speakers of Cantonese English was processed with Praat, and then fitted to a smoothing spline analysis of variance with R to generate smoothing splines at 95% confidence intervals for determining if the the tones in different positions of a word are significantly different from each other. Pitch tracks of tones in individual words were also generated for a detailed examination of the tone contours of the tone spans. Results showed that the realization of different tones was restricted by the position of the syllables in a word. Those tones are significantly different from each other. H spans, Ø spans and M spans were discussed and illustrated with tonal associations.
Index Terms: tone, tone spans, Cantonese English, Hong Kong English
Cite as: Yiu, S.S.Y. (2014) Tone Spans of Cantonese English. Proc. 4th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2014), 143-146
@inproceedings{yiu14_tal,
author={Suki S. Y. Yiu},
title={{Tone Spans of Cantonese English}},
year=2014,
booktitle={Proc. 4th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2014)},
pages={143--146}
}