Abstract
This chapter provides an overview on the phonetic realizations of the Mandarin phoneme inventory. There are two major sections. The first is a general description of the phoneme inventory, which includes five vowels and 19 consonants, along with four lexical tones. In addition to acoustic properties of individual phonemes, major allophonic rules are also discussed. The second section covers some variations on consonants, vowels, and tones in three major Mandarin varieties of Taiwan, Singapore, and China. Some variations are fairly region-specific, while others are more commonly found across various dialects. The former includes the retroflexed vowel suffix in the Mainland variety, the qualitative difference in realizing the neutral tone between the Taiwan and the Mainland variety, and the so-called fifth tone in Singapore Mandarin. The latter includes the deretroflexion and hypercorrection of sibilants, both of which can be found in Taiwan and Singapore Mandarin, and the syllable-final nasal mergers, which can be found in all three major dialects. Interestingly, these cross-dialectal variations also show large within-region variabilities. Both the canonical and the variant realizations of the phonological system are discussed in light of child language acquisition.
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Notes
- 1.
Hanyu Pinyin is adopted for Mandarin romanization throughout this chapter.
- 2.
The phone has been problematic in Mandarin phonology and has invited much discussion and debate. Classical views usually argued for two phones instead of one. For example, Norman (1988) proposed two apical vowels of [ɿ] and [ʅ], Lee-Kim (2014) argued for two syllabic approximates of [ɹ̪] and [ɻ], and Duanmu (2007) suggested two syllabic fricatives of [z̩] and [ʐ̩̩̩]. The former ones of each pair are designated to occur after dental sibilants, while the latter ones are designated to occur after retroflexes. However, since the formants in Fig. 2.3 show little frication, implying that it is at least not always realized as a syllabic fricative, and since the major difference between the two renditions of the phone (zì [tsɨ] ‘Chinese character’ vs. zhì [tʂɨ] ‘mole (face)’) mainly lies in F3, not F2, implying that there is little change in tongue backness, this chapter adopts a unifying symbol [ɨ] instead, following C.-C. Cheng (1973), and views the phonetic variation as a product of coarticulation. There is a slight departure from C.-C. Cheng’s (1973) original proposal, however, as this chapter argues for a nonphonemic status instead (see Fig. 2.1).
- 3.
Some researchers contended that Mandarin consonant inventory also includes an additional set of three alveolo-palatal sibilants /tɕ tɕʰ ɕ/ [e.g., Luo (1993)]. However, since these three are in complementary distribution with the velar series /k kʰ x/, the dental series /ts tsʰ s/, and the retroflexes /tʂ tʂʰ ʂ/, this chapter views them as allophones of other phonemes and discusses them in a later section.
- 4.
The speakers in the Taiwan Mandarin corpus included both young (ages 20–35) and old speakers (ages 50–65) who spent all or most of their childhood and teenage years in the designated sampling locations.
- 5.
An entering tone is a tone that occurs on syllables ending with /p t k ʔ/.
- 6.
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Fon, J. (2020). The Phonetic Realizations of the Mandarin Phoneme Inventory: The Canonical and the Variants. In: Liu, H., Tsao, F., Li, P. (eds) Speech Perception, Production and Acquisition. Chinese Language Learning Sciences. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7606-5_2
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