賽夏語韻律研究

Abstract

This thesis is the first study investigating the prosody of accent in Saisiyat with detailed acoustic measurements. Previous studies have agreed that the stress/accent falls regularly on the ultimate syllable in Saisiyat, yet the discussions were usually confined to the phonological aspects without further phonetic analysis. The significance of the current thesis thus lies not only in providing a thorough picture about the acoustic correlates of the Saisiyat accentual system, but also in relating to other Formosan Austronesian languages to enrich the typological study. Six parameters regarding the acoustic property are used to examine the accent pattern, i.e. fundamental frequency (F0), pitch range, duration, slope, F0 peak alignment and intensity. Two stages of experiments are included. Experiment I explores the acoustic correlates of lexical accents. Experiment II explores the acoustic correlates of the lexical accents in the post-lexical level with the same parameters; other factors are examined here, including accent, coda, position, sentence type, sentence focus and thematic role. Our research questions concern the following issues: (1) What are the acoustic correlates of the lexical accent in Saisiyat? (2) How is the accent realized in the post-lexical level and how does the post-lexical accent correlate with other factors? (3) How do the accents relate to the whole intonation? The questions are answered by several observations in the results. First, it is found that the lexical accent in Saisiyat is mainly realized with pitch-related parameters: F0 value and pitch range. The influence of coda is reflected in the phenomenon of F0 peak delay in the stop-coda words. In the post-lexical level, F0 value, pitch range, duration and intensity all contribute to the accent realization. Meanwhile, the interaction of the factors indicates accent realization in Saisiyat may be position-determined and also influenced by the sentence type: accents occurring initially in a sentence will receive the most prominence, while occurring in the end, the accent will be low-pitched in a statement and high-pitched in a yes-no question. The position-determined characteristic may also contribute to the enhancement of prominence when the sentence focus accords with the thematic role. Finally, we have observed that the lexical accents of content words tend to be preserved in the intonation, accompanied with some local modifications such as accent spreading and accent fronting. Besides, global modifications are involved in affecting the boundary pitch movements. As for the function words, their seemingly irregular pitch pattern serves as interpolating the whole intonation. In conclusion, this thesis provides a sketch of the prosody in Saisiyat from an acoustic point of view, which may hopefully contribute to the advanced study of intonation in Saisiyat.