A phonological analysis of the onset velar nasal merger in Hong Kong Cantonese
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v9i1.5727Keywords:
phonology, cantonese, MaxEnt, nasal, mergerAbstract
This paper provides a phonological analysis of the onset /ŋ/ ↔ /∅/ merger in Hong Kong Cantonese (HKC). What is particularly challenging for a formal analysis here is that the insertion and deletion of [ŋ] can occur in the same environment, since a sound normally does not allow two contrasting operations in the same environment (McCarthy 2003). The current study employs an analysis using a probabilistic constraint-based grammar (Goldwater et al. 2003), by proposing that [ŋ] is a placeless consonant at the onset position. Thus, [ŋ] is inserted placelessly and gets its place from the following vowel. Insertion of other sounds can thus be excluded by penalizing place insertion.
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Copyright (c) 2024 Suet-Ying Lam
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.