Phonological Contrast in Bai

Abstract

This dissertation presents an account of synchronic phonological contrast for the Bai language. Bai is a Sino-Tibetan language primarily spoken in Yunnan Province in Southwest China. There is a sizable amount of published research on this language due to the large amount of Chinese-related basic vocabulary in Bai, which is of considerable interest in the field of Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics. However, most of the available references prioritize the ability to transcribe the observed contrastive syllables as distinct from one another instead of offering synchronic phonological analysis of this language. The proposal I present in this dissertation intends to fill this gap in the literature with phonological analysis of the consonant, vowel, and tone systems of the Erhai (Dali), Jianchuan, and Heqing varieties of Bai. My phonological analysis assumes articulator-based distinctive features, syllable structure, time slots, and other commonly assumed phonological architecture to generate all well-formed phonological representations in this language. The proposal fundamentally differs from prior descriptions in that pre-nuclear glides are consistently treated as constituents of the onset and not as constituents of the rime of the Bai syllable. Along with this fixed syllable structure, underspecification and economy in underlying representations are argued to optimize the ratio of attested-to-possible syllables within the space of predicted syllable types. Furthermore, these principles are suggested to limit the range of surface phonological variation attested across speakers. Specific phonemena addressed in detail include spreading processes (such as palatalization), identification of merged tone categories, representation of the rhotic vowel, and epenthetic segments. The generalizations I identify are supported by descriptions of word-based evidence and phonetic data – both from the literature and collected through lexical elicitation in the field. The Zhaozhuang variety is explored in thorough detail and a syllable inventory of this variety with lexical examples for each syllable type glossed in English and Chinese is included in the appendicies of this dissertation