In the last few months I’ve just about finalized the extended version of the tone sandhi paper. Here is the current version of the abstract:

This study documents speaker variation and lexical variation in the phonological tone change patterns of Jinhua Wu Chinese, one dialect in a region known for particularly complicated tone sandhi systems and regional variation. Previous reports of Jinhua tone sandhi have agreed that there is some lexical variation, but they have disagreed considerably about the contour shapes as well as about mergers between tone categories. It was not clear whether these were differences in methodology, stimuli selection, speaker idiolect, or systematic regional or generational differences. I recorded a word list spoken by 15 speakers of Jinhua Wu from two locations and two generations, and carried out an acoustic analysis of the pitch tracks. The analysis proposes new methods of contour parameterization and tone categorization. The results indicate that there are systematic regional and generational differences in Jinhua sandhi, as well as lexical variation. Also, the space of tone contours is highly constrained, apparently by a combination of coarticulation and the obligatory contour principle (OCP). The generational differences show active tonal evolution that is predicted by theories of sandhi arising from tonal coarticulation. The complexity of the data and the role of phonetic constraints in the phonological patterns require an explanation that appeals to historical change as much as to synchronic grammar.

And here is a new picture of the distances among speakers’ contour systems:

The older speakers (blue border) are on the left and the younger speakers (red border) are on the right. The people from the village (yellow fill) are together in the lower half of the figure.

In the last gazillion months:
- I labeled a bunch of data
- I got much of my analysis method worked out
- I did a bunch more reading, have written up much of my lit review

In the next week and half:
- I need to write up my methodology section
- That will require some more figuring out how my analysis will go
- I should keep working on the labeling, but only as a break from writing

Here is a nice little bit of results

The three speakers in the lower right are the older urban speakers, and the two in the lower left are young urban speakers, as is the one in the middle. The one at the top is an older speaker from the village. There are noticeable differences with the two clusters, but the clustering is pretty reliable, not depending much on the various ways of representing the contours as vectors.

In the last few weeks:
• I finished labeling the first speaker, and one clip per stimulus for another speaker.
• I have contour plots, but they don’t include a mechanism to deal with stimuli that don’t belong to the category I originally thought.
• I’ve decided I need to take research units next quarter to get this done, and I think I will also get a research assistant to help with the labeling.
• I’m stumped on how to do the segmentation on some tokens. It looks to me like prenuclear glides are part of the tone domain in general, but in syllables that don’t have a consonantal onset, you get a longer glide, where part of that should be as outside the tone domain as obstruent onsets are. It looks like the choice is either consistently include the whole glide in the rhyme, or be inconsistent in cutting part of it.

In the next week or two:
• I need to recruit a research assistant.
• I need to write most of a lit review.

In the last four weeks:
• I segmented a bunch of the files, though maybe only half of what I will need.
• I labeled most of one recording. It takes a long time.
• I met with my advisor about issues with my recordings. I was embarrassed how bad the recording quality is, but she said the sound quality issues aren’t that bad, to be expected in field recordings.
• I transcribed the stimuli, including some of the observed variability.
• I translated one more section of the Southern Wuyu book.
• I found one more dialect survey that includes sandhi data for Jinhua. It doesn’t look like either of the ones I already knew about.

In the next couple weeks:
• I need to finish labeling the one recording, and at least one rep per stimulus for one or two other people.
• Produce contour plots from that preliminary data, to get a feel for where this project might go.
• Keep translating.

In the past month:

• I recorded a couple more young people from the city, but was not able to record any more older people, as I had hoped. I also did not record the monosyllable list with anyone from the city, but I’m hoping I won’t need it.
• I went on vacation and moved back to SD.
• I started segmenting the recordings.

In the next couple weeks:

• I need to get the recordings all segmented into the individual sound files.
• I should translate the next section of 南部吴语.
• There are other things with the discourse and Harmonic Grammar projects that I’ve been thinking about, but I will refrain from making any goals there until I get over the boring part of this dialect project.

It has been an eventful month. The absence of buttkicking posts (or any other posts for that matter) has been the result of being pretty busy actually getting things done. There have been some distractions, but I’ve generally been quite productive.

In the past 6 (!) weeks:

• I finalized a stimulus list. I know there are some remaining problems, including some items that are miscategorized because one syllable or the other has shifted tone category. I also have a monosyllable list that will allow me to identify most of these miscategorizations, as well as get monosyllable tone contours. Because the disyllable list is already so long, I am only collecting the monosyllable list from one person in each of the major locations.
• I’ve recorded over 20 people from the area, including half a dozen from the urban area, and 5 from one village nearby. The other people are students from villages scattered throughout the two county-like zones around Jinhua, and from Lanxi.
• It’s been harder than expected to find people from the same village, since this generation has moved around so much, and even the older generations often moved from somewhere else. And then older women rarely attended school long enough to attain a high level of literacy, and younger speakers, especially in the city, speak Wuyu rather little, and so have limited vocabulary and low fluency. But my friends here have been very helpful finding people who have that combination of literacy and fluency.

In this coming week, my last week in Jinhua:

• I need to record a couple more people from the city.
• I need to record the monosyllable list with someone from the city.
• I will otherwise be busy with logistics of moving back to San Diego.

In the past three weeks:

• I spent most of my time getting ready for the wedding and then spending time with our guests.
• I did record the current list of stimuli with my tutor, and threw out some more items. In addition to the category IIB sonorants and obstruents behaving differently, there are some other problems, most of which I think are associated with category IV syllables losing their codas. There are also a couple more items found where they simply use a different word here.
• I finally got an email from my contact from Lanxi, but I was not able to meet with him last week, and he is gone on an internship now.

In the next week:

• I need analyze the recording I have, and go ahead with a semi-final list of stimuli. Even if there are some partial gaps, the cells where there aren’t problems should be sufficient to answer my major research questions about variation, and I need to collect data.
• I need to put together a list of mono-syllables from the disyllable tokens, so I know when there are differences in mono-syllable tone category.
• I need to start scheduling recording sessions for next week.

In the past three weeks:

• I met with my tutor twice, and got familiarity ratings for the stimulus list, plus a few possible stories. At least for younger speakers, it will apparently be easier to just translate the story from Standard Mandarin on the fly than to try to read the unfamiliar characters of idiomatic Wuyu. The stimulus list does have a few items that are unfamiliar to the informant, possibly not used at all in Jinhua.
• I translated the next couple sections of 南部吴语. When I went to check some statements there with the wordlist, I realized that 南部吴语 and the dictionary disagree about what happened to tone IIB obstruent-onset syllables. 南部吴语 says that all tone IIB syllables merged into tone IIA in Jinhua and Lanxi, but the dictionary indicates that many if not most obstruent-initial syllables are pronounced with tone IIIB. The dictionary introduction says this is the case for literary pronunciation, and that casual pronunciation renders them as tone IIA, but I thought the dictionary pronunciations were going for casual speech. At minimum, it suggests that some obstruent-initial tokens could behave differently than the sonorant-onset tokens, in sandhi if not in citation form.
• I did also spend some time listening to 二十分可乐, and more time hanging out with friends who speak the local dialect with each other.

In the next couple weeks:

• I need to decide on a stimulus list. I have collected some possible alternatives from the dictionary, but not for all the gaps, particularly if tone IIB obstruents and sonorants do not behave the same. I also still am not sure of the original source of the stimulus list, and know of no alternative lists. I hope to meet with a Chinese student studying Ningbo dialect and/or the professor who was doing dialect research. And I need to check the alternative words with a couple native speakers.
• I’d like to finish a couple more sections of 南部吴语.
• But two weeks from now, my parents are visiting and we’re doing a wedding the day they get here, so things will be a bit busy.

It has been three weeks since last butt-kicking. In the past three weeks,
– I finished the short paper, and submitted it to a couple professors for comment.
– I translated the next section of 南部吴语, the previous post. It was very long.
– I actually haven’t had much opportunity to listen to 二十分可乐. When I had time, there were technical problems.
– I haven’t written the Harmonic Grammar counting email.
– I did find the standard lists of tokens for surveying tone sandhi. I couldn’t find a citation for them though. I’m still unclear about it’s origin, but the list I found (on a message board) is the same one I had started to copy from 吴语语音研究.

In the next couple weeks,
– I will have to spend some time on a trip to Hong Kong, and on a short job to better afford it.
– I need to focus on getting ready to record the sandhi lists. I need to meet with my tutor and get rough familiarity ratings, though if there are problematic cells, I don’t know what solution there could be.
– In view of this focus, I’m skipping ahead in 南部吴语 to the chapter on tone. I’ll translate the next section.
– And I do want to keep watching 二十分可乐.

In the past week:
– I have made progress on the short paper, though it is not yet done.
– I did translate the next section of 南部吴语, a rather short section.
– I did not write the email about counting in harmonic grammar.

In the coming week:
– I really need to finish the short paper.
– I will translate the next section of 南部吴语.
– I will have more opportunity to listen to 二十分可乐
– I still need to write that email