Challenging Sonority - Cross-linguistic Evidence - Martin J. Ball

Challenging Sonority - Cross-linguistic Evidence - Martin J. Ball

An Investigation of Sonority Theory in Mandarin Chinese

Challenging Sonority - Cross-linguistic Evidence - Martin J. Ball

Li Qiang [+-]
Dalian University of Technology
Qiang Li is associate professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Dalian University of Technology, China. He is currently working towards his PhD in the Department of Communicative Disorders, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, USA. His research interests are focused on language perception, especially on how people with language disorders perceive a language, in order to explore more general patterns of language perception in human beings. Currently he is studying tone perception at the phonetic and phono- logical levels in Chinese speakers with aphasia, together with relative clause comprehension at the syntactic and semantic levels, in order to investigate patterns of perception in Chinese.

Description

The Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) has been viewed as the fundamental tenet of sonority theory on a sonority ranking scale. Yet few studies focus on Mandarin Chinese when examining the sonority hypothesis, except for Chung, Code and Ball (2004) on Cantonese. The current study investigated the 2500 most commonly used modern Chinese characters, summarized the patterns of their phoneme ordering, and analyzed the distributions of the patterns of phoneme ordering. The results show both agreements and disagreements when compared with the SSP. These results can be explained either because the SSP is not universal, or because the 2500 Chinese characters chosen are not thoroughly representative of Mandarin Chinese. Thus more data are suggested to be collected and analyzed.

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Citation

Qiang, Li. An Investigation of Sonority Theory in Mandarin Chinese. Challenging Sonority - Cross-linguistic Evidence. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 97-109 Oct 2016. ISBN 9781781792278. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=25671. Date accessed: 28 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.25671. Oct 2016

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