Vowel restructuring under retroflex trill suffixation in JingMen Mandarin
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/TheLinguisticProceedings/2025/16/01/025/000685Keywords:
vowel change, morphophonology, rhotic suffixAbstract
This study employs acoustic and descriptive analyses to investigate how the rhotic trill [r], representing the -zi suffix, influences the monophthongal vowel system of Jingmen Mandarin. The analysis compares monosyllabic words representing the base vowel system with their -zi-suffixed counterparts using F1 and F2 formant measurements. The results show that underlying monophthongs tend to shift systematically towards [r], with front and back vowels undergoing resyllabification, while mid vowels display more stable shifts without resyllabification. These findings suggest that vowel frontness plays a key role in the restructuring of the Jingmen Mandarin vowel system, as speakers adjust articulation to accommodate the low-mid rhotic [r].
References
Huang, J., Hsieh, F., & Chang, Y. (2020). Er-suffixation in Southwestern Mandarin: An EMA and ultrasound study. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2020.
Lee, W. (2005). A phonetic study of the “erhua” rimes in Beijing Mandarin. In Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology. Lisbon, Portugal.
Liu, H. (2017). Jingmen fangyan yanjiu [Jingmen dialect research]. Central China Normal University Press.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
