Retroflex and Non-retroflex Merger in Shanghai Accented Mandarin Liyi Zhu A thesis submitted in ...

69 Pages·2012·2.03 MB·English

Retroflex and Non-retroflex Merger in Shanghai Accented Mandarin

Liyi Zhu

A thesis
submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

University of Washington
2012

Committee:

Betsy Evans

Richard Wright

Program Authorized to Offer Degree:
Linguistics
University of Washington

Abstract

Retroflex and Non-retroflex Merger in Shanghai Accented Mandarin

Liyi Zhu

Chair of the Supervisory Committee:
Assistant Professor Betsy Evans
Department of Linguistics

The Mandarin spoken in Shanghai differs in some aspects from the Mandarin
spoken in Beijing. One of the most notable differences is a merging of the retroflex
consonants with the non-retroflex ones (Zheng, Sproat, Gu, Shafran, Zhou, Su,
Jurafsky, Starr, & Yoon, 2005). Based on quantitative analysis of three pairs of
phonological variables [ʂ] vs. [s], [tʂh] vs. [tsh], and [tʂ] vs. [ts], this thesis takes up the
study of retroflex and non-retroflex merger in Shanghai-accented Mandarin, by using
recorded interviews to explore whether such variation is correlated with social class,
age, gender and task formality.
The statistical results indicate that social class, age and task formality all have a
significant effect on retroflex and non-retroflex merger for Shanghainese. Gender,
however, was shown not having a strong correlation with retroflex and non-retroflex
merger.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures Page
LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................... iii
LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................ iv
1. Introduction ............................................................................................................ 1
Thesis Overview ................................................................................................... 1
Organization ......................................................................................................... 4
2. Background ............................................................................................................. 5
Introduction ........................................................................................................... 5
The Chinese Language ......................................................................................... 5
Previous Work on Mandarin Consonant Merger .................................................. 7
The Chinese Social Classes .................................................................................. 9
Emerging Chinese Middle Class ..................................................................... 9
The Restructuring of Chinese Working Class ............................................... 10
Brief History of Shanghai ................................................................................... 12
The Population and Shanghai Identity ................................................................ 13
The Sociolinguistics Situation in Shanghai ........................................................ 15
3. Methods ................................................................................................................ 17
Introduction ......................................................................................................... 17
Participants ......................................................................................................... 17
Indexing Social Class ......................................................................................... 19
Instrumentation ................................................................................................... 22
Materials and Data Collection ............................................................................ 23
Interview Task ............................................................................................... 23
Map Task ....................................................................................................... 24
Word List Task .............................................................................................. 25
Acoustic Analysis ............................................................................................... 26
Acoustic Cues of Retroflex/Non-retroflex Consonants ................................ 26
Spectrums in Praat ......................................................................................... 27
Statistical Analysis .............................................................................................. 29
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4. Results .................................................................................................................. 30
Social class .......................................................................................................... 30
Age ...................................................................................................................... 32
Gender ................................................................................................................. 33
Task formality ..................................................................................................... 34
Outliers ............................................................................................................... 35
Summary ............................................................................................................. 37
5. Discussion ................................................................................................................ 39
Interpretation of Results ..................................................................................... 39
Limitations of Current Study and Directions for Further Research.................... 47
References .................................................................................................................... 49
Appendix A: Consent Form ......................................................................................... 54
Appendix B: Demographic Questionnaire ................................................................ 57
Appendix C: Interview Questions ................................................................................ 58
Appendix D: Map Task ................................................................................................ 59
Appendix E: Wordlist .................................................................................................. 60
Appendix F: Descriptive Statistics............................................................................... 63

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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Number Page
Figure 1: Retroflex in spontaneous speech and read speech by age category ............ 8
Figure 2: Map of Shanghai, China. (From Central Intelligence Agency, 2011) ...... 12
Figure 3: Chart of Migrants vs. Native residents in overall population in Shanghai14
Figure 4: Number of subjects for score 2-12 ............................................................ 22
Figure 5: Waveform and spectrogram for a retroflex production of 沙 [ʂa:]. ........ 28
Figure 6: Waveform and spectrogram for a retroflex production of 沙 [sa:]. ........ 28
Figure7: Use of the retroflex merger by social classes ............................................. 31
Figure 9: Use of the retroflex merger by gender ...................................................... 34
Figure 10: Use of the retroflex merger by task formality ......................................... 35

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LIST OF TABLES
Table Number Page
Table 1. Number of subjects by sex and age group. (n = 24) ................................... 18
Table 2. Number of subjects by education level. (n = 24)........................................ 19
Table 3. The three components of socioeconomic index for Shanghainese with their
relative weights. ........................................................................................................ 20
Table 4: Number and percentage of merged retroflex consonants ........................... 30
Figure 8: Use of the retroflex merger by age ............................................................ 33
Table 5: Frequency of retroflex merger by comparison ........................................... 36
Table 6: Frequency of retroflex merger by comparison ........................................... 37

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1. Introduction
Thesis Overview
As China’s most developed city, Shanghai not only attracts millions of
dreamers, its language use also attracts many scholars’ attention. The common
observation that Mandarin use is increasing in Shanghai (Wu & Gordon 1987,
Chu 2001, Yan 2003) is supported by recent language attitude surveys indicating
that Shanghainese people hold increasingly positive views of Mandarin (Bai 1994,
Zhou 2001). If Mandarin is indeed popularizing in Shanghai, are the people there
speaking it in a standard way? Before I go further, it might be necessary for me to
provide a bit information on standardization and standard Mandarin. According to
Milroy (2001), standardization consists of the imposition of uniformity upon a
class of objects, which involves conscious human intervention in language
maintenance and language change. An important ideological effect of
“standardization” is the firm belief of correctness (Milroy, 2001). As for the
standard Mandarin, Li (2004) gives detailed explanation based on the definition
made by the State Council in 1956: standard Mandarin ‘‘is modeled on the
pronunciation of Beijing, draws on Northern Chinese as its base dialect [i.e.,
lexicon], and receives its syntactic norms from exemplary works of vernacular
literature”. The use of standard Mandarin as the medium of instruction in the
educational system and in the media has contributed to the spread of the notion of
standard Mandarin. As a result, Chinese people clearly understand which is
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standard and correct Mandarin and which is non-standard and incorrect.
The current study uses recorded interviews to examine whether or not
Shanghainese were using standard mandarin features or not in Shanghai, and how
speakers’ social class, as well as age and gender might correlate with the use of
standard and nonstandard linguistic variables.
Putonghua, or “common speech”, is the official name of standard Mandarin in
mainland China (Dong, 2010). However, Chinese is a vast dialectal complex
containing hundreds of mutually intelligible local varieties (Norman, 2007). Among
the many Mandarin varieties, one that is much-studied is Southern-area Mandarin. It
has been widely observed that the Mandarin spoken in areas where southern Chinese
dialects dominate differs in some features from the Mandarin spoken in Beijing (Chen
1999, Yao 1989, Chen 1990). Such areas include Shanghai. A recent study by Zheng
et al. (2005) investigated change in Mandarin in Shanghai by studying the merging of
the retroflex series of the consonant initials [ʂ], [tʂh], [tʂ] into the alveolar series [s],
[tsh], [ts]. Their data indicate that standard use of retroflex (not merged) is associated
with younger female more educated speakers, based on reading passages rather than
spontaneous speech.
The following thesis takes up the study of retroflex and non-retroflex merger in
Shanghai-accented Mandarin by using recorded interviews to explore whether such
language variation is correlated with social class.
We can hardly consider the social distribution of language without encountering
the pattern of social stratification which pervades the life of the city (Labov, 1966). A
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number of sociolinguistic studies (Labov 1966; Wolfram 1969; Fasold 1972; Trudgill
1974) have convincingly demonstrated that linguistic variation may correlate
extremely closely with social differences.
One of the most important contributions of Labov's quantitative paradigm has
been to allow us to examine systematically the relationship between language
variation and speaker variables such as sex, ethnicity, social network, and social class
(Milroy & Milroy 1992). Although there are several classical sociolinguistic studies
that focus on English language variation and social class, very few of such
quantitative analyses have been carried out on Mandarin. One of the few studies was
by Zhang (2005), which provides a rigorous variationist account of the Mandarin
spoken in Beijing by employees of state-owned vs. foreign-owned businesses. My
principal interest in the current research is to study the correlation between language
variation and social classes in Shanghai, another large city in China.
The interviews conducted for this research included the collection of
demographic information, an interview about the subjects’ lifestyle, a modified map
task and wordlist task. Three methods of measuring retroflex merger were used to carry
out a quantitative acoustic analysis: Noise peak, skewness, and lowering F3.
The research examines the effect of social class, age, gender and task formality
on the retroflex merger in Shanghai. The thesis seeks to contribute to sociophonetics
studies on retroflex and non-retroflex merger of accented Mandarin. Results of this
study will provide a better understanding of such linguistic phenomenon in Shanghai.
The study will show how linguistic practice in the local site of Shanghai is influenced
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by what is happening in the transnational Chinese community and the global market.

Organization
The thesis is organized as follows: Section 2 provides information on the
Chinese language, Chinese social classes, and previous literature on retroflex merger
in Mandarin. Section 3 describes methods used in the study. Section 4 discusses
results. Section 5 draws conclusions and discusses further implications.