Acoustic patterns in Hong Kong Cantonese hesitation markers: Vowel quality and omnisyllabic tone

Abstract

Hesitation markers (HMs) lie somewhere on the dividing line between linguistic and sub-linguistic, evincing at the same time crosslinguistic commonalities as well as language-specific features (Candea et al. 2005; Dingemanse & Woensdregt 2020). This study seeks to expand on understanding of these lexically peripheral items by analyzing their acoustic properties in Hong Kong Cantonese (HKCT), including vowel quality and F0. Recent work by Dingemanse and Woensdregt (2020) discusses phonetic similarities in HMs across languages, which are constrained by adherence to the phonologies of their respective languages. However, it is unclear how HMs are incorporated into HKCT tonal phonology, which can be characterized as ‘omnisyllabic’ (Matisoff 1995), every syllable being associated with a lexical tone. The present study gathers acoustic data (F0, F1-F2, duration) from the PolyU Corpus of Spoken Chinese (http://wongtaksum.no-ip.info:81/corpus.htm) across 10 speakers and 196 HMs, comparing them against 525 lexical items. Results for F1-F2 clustered around mid-front /ɛ/, which is in line both with crosslinguistic trends and HKCT phonology. Results for F0 clustered around the lower end of the pitch range, approaching Tones 3 and 6, which is expected given effort minimization trends. However, establishing a connection with a particular lexical tone was complicated by the similarity of Tones 3 and 6, which could not be statistically distinguished. Cross-speaker analysis showed considerable variation in F0, indicating that context, intonation, or idiolectal variation may play a substantial role. This has implications for our understanding of how peripheral items like hesitation markers are treated in omnisyllabic tone languages like Cantonese.