The Thai Tonal Space.
| Number | 1074 |
|---|---|
| Year | 1997 |
| Drawer | 20 |
| Entry Date | 06/29/1998 |
| Authors | Abramson, Arthur S. |
| Contact | |
| Publication | Abramson, A.S., Southeast Asian Linguistic Studies in honour of Vichin Panupong. Bangkok: Chalulongkorn University Press, 1997. |
| url | http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1074.pdf |
| Abstract | In the analysis of a tone language (Gandour, 1994), the linguist normally thinks first of pitch levels and glides as the probable phonetic basis of phonologically relevant tones, even though there may be other factors, apparently secondary in importance, that go along with pitch. Of course, it is well known that is some languages, something other than pitch, perhaps a voice quality, may be dominant in one or more of the tones. Against the background of earlier auditory (Haas & Subhanka, 1945) and instrumental (Bradley, 1911) analysis, Abramson (1962) was apparently the first to combine techniques of acoustic analysis and speech synthesis to investigate the tones of Standard Thai (Siamese) - or, indeed, any tone language - both acoustically and perceptually. Since then, of course, other such treatments of Asian languages, including Thai, have appeared (e.g., Erickson, 1974; Gandour, 1978; Zee & Maddieson, 1980). The present study is part of an ongoing but intermittent exploration (e.g., Abramson, 1975, 1976) of the Thai tonal “space”. This space is taken to be the set of articulatory and auditory dimensions by which the speaker of Thai is constrained in production and perception. This paper makes use of unpublished or reanalyzed data obtained in Thailand from time to time at the former Central Institute of English Language of Mahidol University, the Faculty of Humanities, Ramkhamhaeng University, and the Faculty of Arts of Chulalongkorn University. It has three broad goals: to revalidate earlier work on “ideal” contours for the tones on isolated monosyllables, to gain some insight into the latitudes of shifting levels and glides for the intelligibility of the tones, and to take another look (cf. Abramson, 1978) at the typological usefulness of the distinction between static and dynamic tones. The identifiability of isolated natural Thai tones had been demonstrated (Abramson, 1962) and was reaffirmed with much more extensive testing later (Abramson, 1975). These findings were a necessary precursor to the five experiments with synthetic tones presented in this report. Aside from the baseline data for all five tones obtained in Experiment 1, the report gives no serious attention to the falling tone, which will have to be treated in another study. |
| Notes |
Search Publications