Vu Trinh
Pronouns: he/him/his
Research Mentor(s): San Duanmu
Co-Presenter:
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Linguistics / LSA
Presentation Date: April 20
Presentation Type: Oral5
Session: Session 5 – 3:40pm – 4:30 pm
Room: Breakout Room 1
Authors: Vu Trinh, San Duanmu
Presenter: 2
Abstract
Vietnamese is a tone language, in which the tone of a syllable can distinguish words. Phonetically, tones differ from each other in pitch contours and sometimes in voice quality as well. In standard descriptions, such as Kirby (2011), the intended pith contour of a tone is what we observe when the syllable occurs in isolation. However, as Han & Kim (1974) have shown, when syllables occur in context, the actual pitch contours hardly resemble the intended contours. For example, the intended pitch contour of the tone named ‘hoi’ is a fall-rise, but when it occurs in context, it is often just a fall. This study makes two new contributions. The first is to offer an algorithm that identifies the actual pith contours of tones. The second is to describe and explain the relation between intended pitch contours and their actual pitch contours. The contributions can speed up the analysis of tonal variations in other languages and facilitate the documentation of endangered languages. References: Han, Mieko S., & Kong-On Kim. 1974. Phonetic variation of Vietnamese tones in disyllabic utterances. Journal of Phonetics 2: 223-232. Kirby, James P. 2011. Vietnamese (Hanoi Vietnamese). Journal of the International Phonetic Association 41.3 (December 2011): 381-392.
Social Sciences
