Title

Types and Trends of Free Variation in Taiwanese Mandarin: A Study Based on Speech Corpora

Author

Chou Yi-ming, Bai Ming-hong, Lin Ching-lung

Genre

Article

Pages

175-217

DOI

10.6503/THJCS.202403_54(1).0005

Download

PDF

Language

Chinese

Key words

heterophone, free variation, linguistic prescriptivism, corpus, dominant variant

Abstract

Language change occurs naturally and inevitably. Understanding the proportion of phonetic variant users is conducive to clarifying the causes and trends of the evolution of the phonological system (Au 2008). Over the past three decades, research on Taiwanese Mandarin phonetics has been broad in scope and rich in results (Su 2018). However, little research has been conducted in the Mandarin-speaking community of Taiwan on the frequency of phonetic variants, their interrelatedness, the trends of their development, and people’s preferences. According to Her (2010), most phonetic research has involved focused but fragmented analyses, and a comprehensive linguistic discourse remains lacking. Rather than a conventional analysis of an acoustic property or phonological rules, this study focuses on phonetic free variation. Empirical evidence was gathered from large speech corpora to analyze the characteristics and developmental trend of phonetic variants. The following results were obtained: (1) These variants are mainly characterized by tones; (2) pronunciation has been simplified; and (3) phonetic innovation may fill gaps in, or expand, the phonetic inventory.