effects of case markers on burmese declarative intonation: an experimental study

Effects of case markers on Burmese declarative intonation: an experimental study

Seunghun J. Lee* , Phyu Phyu Win**

I. Introduction

In prosodic typology, languages are divided into tonal languages and

non-tonal languages based on their word-level prosody (Jun 2005). Burmese is a tonal language. In sentence-level prosody, languages express culminativity with acoustic features such as pitch, duration and amplitude. Tonal languages may or may not have stress: Mandarin is reported to have stress while Cantonese doesn’t have it. Although the word-level prosody (tone) has been well studied in Burmese, the prosody at the sentence-level is not yet well understood.

Burmese has three tones and these tones would interact with intonation patterns. A survey of previous literature (Bernot 1963, Richter 1967, Okell 1969, Bradley 1982, Lee 2007, Gruber 2012, among others) shows that most studies focus on the acoustic correlates of tonal categories such as duration, f0 and phonation type among others. As for intonation studies, the authors do not know of any studies. Since Gruber (2012), we understand more the characteristics of tones in Burmese. With the newly gained knowledge, we aim to fill a gap in Burmese studies by investigating intonation of declarative sentences.

* Central Connecticut State University

** Bilingual Language Center, Myanmar

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In this paper, we report experimental results in which prosodic culminativity appears in the presence of a case marker. The juncture before the case marker displays a slight rise of pitch, potentially signaling a rhythmic unit in Burmese intonation. This pitch rise is found to a much lesser degree in the absence of a case marker.

Burmese is spoken by about 32 million speakers, mostly within the Republic of Myanmar. The basic word order of Burmese is subject-object-verb (SOV), in which the subject and the object are optionally marked with a case suffix. Sentences are grammatical with or without these suffixes. Verbal roots require a verbal suffix. Burmese has three tones (low, high and creaky) and also argued to have a fourth tone (checked) that only occurs in closed syllables with a glottal stop coda.

The second section describes in detail the tonal categories in Burmese as well as the case marking suffixes. In section 3, the data collection methods are described. The results of the collected data are presented in section 4. The last section discusses various issues that stem from the results we obtained from the recordings.

II. Burmese: tone and case marking

1. Tone in Burmese

Burmese has three tones (low, high and creaky). The fourth tone

(checked) appears in closed syllables with a glottal stop coda, which is why some studies (Bradley 1982, Bernot 1963, Yip 1995, Lee 2009) do not include the checked tone as part of the tonal inventory. In this paper, we will focus on the first three tones that occur in open syllables or syllables with nasal codas.

Effects of case markers on Burmese declarative intonation:

an experimental study 63

The low tone has a low pitch that shows slight declination. The high tone has a high pitch with a slight fall within the syllable. The creaky tone is accompanied with creaky phonation and often shows a sharp fall in the pitch. Tonal minimal pairs are shown in (1). Throughout the paper, Burmese transliteration will be used instead of the Burmese script. Creaky tone is marked with a dot after a syllable (using the Burmese convention), low tone is unmarked and high tone is marked with an acute accent.

(1) Tonal miminal pairs (except the checked tone)

a. la. [la̰] ‘moon, month’ dot b. la [là] ‘to come’ no mark c. lá [lá] ‘(question ending)’ acute accent Gruber (2012) reports results obtained from a careful examination of

articulation, acoustic and perception of Burmese tone. His results show that the three-way (or four-way) tonal contrast is shown in the duration and in the pitch. In terms of duration, citation forms show a clear distinction, though the distinction is somewhat neutralized in closed syllables with an obstruent coda (CVO). Fundamental frequency also shows a contrast between high, low and creaky tone. Results on phonation types, however, suggest that Burmese employs a two-way disnction: more laxed (high tone and low tone) and more constricted (creaky tone and checked tone). This two-way phonation distinction found in citation forms and in the phrase-final position, however, is neutralized in the phrase-medial position.

Gruber’s (2012) findings confirm reports from previous studies where results from impressionistic observations from few speakers were made, or with a smaller number of acoustic correlates. For a summary of Burmese tone in these studies, see Watkins (2000: 140) and Gruber (2012: 41).

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2. Nominal suffixes in Burmese Burmese has a subject marker /ka./ (creaky tone) and an object marker

/kou/ (low tone)1. Both of these markers can optionally be dropped, resulting in four different types of sentences. A sentence may not have a marker (2a), have both markers (2b), have only the object marked (2c) or have only the subject marked (2d). There is no change in meaning between the variations.

(2) Subject/object markers in a sentence in the low tone context

a. nga da ka-deh no suffix b. nga-ka. da-kou ka-deh both suffixes c. nga da-kou ka-deh object only d. nga-ka. da ka-deh subject only I (-SUBJECT) THIS (-OBJECT) COVER-DECLARATIVE ENDING ‘I cover this’ The presence of the subject marker or the object marker assigns an

unambiguous syntactic function of a constituent in a sentence. The presence of the subject marker after /nga/ clearly shows that /nga/ has the role of a subject in a given sentence. If the prosodic organization of Burmese intonation demarcates edges, we hypothesize that the presence of the subject or the object marker be the target of edge marking. We predict

1 The subject marker is usually the nominative case marker and the object marker is

the accusative case marker. However, the relationship is not so straightforward because the subject marker can also denote contrastive topic (cf. San San Hnin Tun & Jenny 2012). In this paper, we will use ‘subject’ and ‘object’ as a cover term for these suffixes without ascribing to a syntactic theory.



that sentences with one of these markers will show different intonation patterns from sentences without them.

In the next two sections, we report an experiment that aims test the effects of these markers on sentential intonation.

III. Experiment

The goal of the experiment is to investigate the role of subject/object

markers in the intonation of a Burmese declarative sentence with three constituents: subject, object and verb.

1. Stimuli

All constituents in a single sentence are assigned to the same tonal

category, and the number of the syllables of the targets was less than two as in (3). Each sentence was constructed into four variants: with no marker, with both markers, with the subject marker [ka.] only and with the object marker [kou] only. The subject marker has a creaky tone. Thus, in this exploratory study, the presence of the subject marker might affect the intonation pattern, while the presence of the object marker (low tone) would not necessarily affect the intonation pattern.

(3) A sample list of stimuli subject [ka.] complement [kou] verb

low nga da ka-deh I THIS COVER ‘I cover this.’

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In the original experiment, 16 stimuli were presented to the participants,

which included items with the checked tone. An additional 16 fillers were the same type of declarative sentences that expressed eating or drinking activities (e.g. ‘Uncle drinks beer’). The stimuli were written in Burmese script and were randomized with Excel, after which they were exported to PowerPoint.

2. Participants

Four native speakers of Burmese (two male, M1 and M2; two female, F1

and F2) participated in a single recording session. The speakers were between the ages of 18 and 25. They all had at least one year of university education and spoke Burmese in their everyday life. Parents of the participants also spoke Burmese only. None of them lived abroad for an extended period, and none was fluent in other minority languages of Myanmar. None of them reported an oral or auditory problem. The only difference between the male and the female participants were that the males were from the Yangon area while the females were from Mandalay. Participants received compensation for their time.

2 The word [əәpo.] ‘above’ has an adverbial meaning but is used like a noun in this

sentence. In this paper, we will treat this lexical item as an object.

high úlé wá htá-deh UNCLE BAMBOO PUT.AWAY ‘Uncles puts bamboo away’

creaky əәdo. əәpo. o.-deh AUNTIE ABOVE2 SHOUT ‘Auntie shouts above.’



3. Methods: recordings and analysis

Recording sessions were held in Yangon, Myanmar, where a sound-

attenuated (but not sound-proof) room was available. The recordings were done using the Marantz PMD 671 recorder and a head-worn microphone Shure WH-30. After being seated comfortably in front of a Dell laptop computer, participants spoke two phrases in order to check the recording level. Thereafter, participants practiced pronouncing sentences with 3 slides and were given opportunities to ask any questions that they might have. During the main session, PowerPoint slides with randomized sentences were manually advanced by the first author. The set of 32 sentences were read 3 times with a short break inbetween each set. Each session lasted no longer than 30 minutes.

After the session, the recordings were transcribed with the Praat program (Boersma and Weenink 2013). First, a textgrid was added to sound files. Second, the sentence IDs were assigned to each sentence. Third, the textgrid and its corresponding sounds were extracted into individual files. All these processes were automatically conducted using a Praat script.

The files were then manually annotated for each morpheme. The annotated files were examined using audio-visual cues. Two parameters were examined: fundamental frequency (f0) for pitch and spectrogram for creakiness. Analyses are based on the second repetition produced by three speakers (M2, F1 and F2). Speaker M1 often showed halting speech and was only used to confirm generalizations found in the speech of other three people.

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IV. Results 1. The low tone context

Sentences with low tone constituents show a relatively flat intonation.

There is a slight downdrift of intonation toward the end of a sentence (fig1.a). There is a slight bump in f0 before the subject or the object marker (fig1.b). This bump also appears when only the subject marker is present (fig1.c). This bump is less prominent when the subject marker is absent but the object marker is present (fig1.d). The pitch track in (fig1.d) shows that there is a slight rise toward the end of the subject, even in the absence of the subject marker.

a. No markers b. With both markers

c. Subject marker only d. Object marker only

Figure 1. Intonation of the low tone context produced by speaker F1

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The lowest point in the intonation coincides with the verbal suffix.

Speaker F2 often has a steep rise in f0 at the end of a sentence as shown in figure 2 (see the circle). We interpret this as individual variation because the other three speakers do not show such a rise.

Figure 2. Speaker F2, production of the low tone context without markers

2. The high tone context

In the high tone context, downstep is observed as shown in figure 3. The

subject has the highest f0 and the object has the second highest f0. The verb either has a lower f0 (fig3.a and d) or equal f0 (fig3.b and c) in comparison with the object. When there is a subject marker, there is a f0 declination within the suffix (fig3.b and c). This fall of f0 is due to the subject suffix being a creaky tone whose characteristics is a sharp fall in f0. Such declination of f0 is also found in the object marker /kou/ (fig3.b and d).

As in the low tone context, the presence of a marker is realized with a bump in the f0 before the marker (fig3.b, c and d). While downstep occurs between the subject and the object in the absence of the subject marker

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(fig3.d), downstep is not observed between the object and the verb in the absence of the object marker (fig3.a).

The dip in the intonation invariably occurs at the onset of the verbal suffix. The only exception is speaker F2, who shows a steep rise at the end of each sentence (see figure 2), all other speakers show only a slight rise or a further declination after the verbal suffix.

Figure 3. Intonation of high tone sentences produced by speaker F1

a. none b. both c. sbj. marked d. obj. marked

SBJ OBJ SBJ OBJ SBJ OBJ SBJ OBJ

F1 271 238 272 197 283 240 285 220

F2 264 222 257 212 261 225 271 218

M1 164 144 169 136 160 143 165 132

M2 140 116 142 108 138 117 144 111

Table 1. Measurement of f0 in H toned sentences (in Hz)



Table 1 shows the mid point of the f0 obtained from the subject and the

object, excluding the markers, from each speaker. The numbers show that the f0 of object (shaded cells) is always lower than the f0 of the subject. The degree of downstep is greater in female speakers (mean = 49 Hz) than in male speakers (mean = 27 Hz).

As far as we know, downstep is underreported in studies on Burmese intonation. A controlled set of sentences in the high tone context shows that downstep is a phonologically active process.

3. The creaky tone context

The f0 of sentences with creaky tone shows a flat pitch on the subject,

similar to the high tone context as shown in figure 4. After the subject, f0 starts declining gradually through the object and the verb until the end of a sentence. Before the subject marker there is a bump of f0 (fig4.b and c). This slight rise of f0 is less prominent before the object marker (fig4.b and d).

In the verbal suffix, f0 occasionally rises slightly at the end of a sentence (fig4.b and c). This type of final rise of f0 in the creaky voice context is shown with greater intra- and inter-speaker variability. Downstep observed in the high tone context is not found in the creaky tone context.

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Figure 4. Intonation of creaky tone sentences produced by speaker F1 In the creaky tone context, a shift of creaky voice to the object marker is

found. Figure 5 shows spectrograms of four sentences in the creaky tone context. When there is no subject/object marker, both the subject and the object have a final creaky voice, shown with irregular voicing pulses on the spectrogram (fig5.a). Creaky voice is absent at the juncture between these nouns and the markers (fig5.b), but creaky voice appears at the end of the markers. It is natural for the subject marker itself to have creaky voice because it is underlyingly creaky voice.

The object marker, however, is underlyingly low tone. Thus, creaky voice after the object marker is unexpected. The shift of creaky voice to the object marker from the object is also found in (fig5.d).



Figure 5. Spectrograms of sentences in the creaky tone context produced by speaker F1. Upward arrows mark the presence of creaky voice.

It should be noted that the prominent creaky voice after the subject

marker is limited to the creaky tone context, suggesting that the creaky voice of the subject marker is somehow enhanced in this case. The presence of creaky voice accompanied by an irregular voicing pulse is barely visible in the high tone and the low tone context as shown (or rather not shown) in figure 6.

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Figure 6. Spectrograms of the subject marker in the high and low

tone contexts produced by speaker F1. Upward arrows mark the end of the subject marker.

V. Discussion

1. The role of case markers in intonation

We hypothesized that the presence or absence of subject/object markers

will have an effect on sentence intonation. The effect was more prominent in the creaky and high tone context than in the low tone context. A slight rise of pitch was found at the juncture of nouns and their markers.

The target of an f0 peak at the juncture is possibly at the left edge of the subject/object marker. This f0 peak was more prominent at the left edge of the subject marker compared to the left edge of the object marker. Moreover, the f0 peak was more distinct in the high and low tone contexts than in the creaky tone context.



The prominent f0 peak at the left edge of the subject marker is because the subject marker /ko./ has a creaky tone, which has repeatedly been shown to have a falling pitch. An alternative explanation can be that the peak alignment of f0 is at the left edge of a marker. This explanation is also possible because the low-toned object marker /kou/ also shows a smaller peak of f0 at the left edge.

Considering that both the subject marker and the object marker show an f0 peak at the left edge, we may be able to hypothesize that the right edge of the subject/object marker in Burmese assigns a low-toned boundary and the peak f0 has to align with the left edge of the markers. Typologically, this pattern is different from standard Korean, which has the SOV word order and optional markers of the subject and the object as in Burmese. In Korean, an f0 peak aligns with the right edge of such markers (cf. Jun 1998).

This hypothesis, however, needs to be further tested with markers that have an underlying high tone. Possibly, f0 may stay flat after the peak if the marker has a high tone. A further study is warranted for understanding more complex phenomena related to tone and intonation.

2. Creaky voice

Creaky voice in Burmese received attention in previous studies (e.g.

Javkins and Maddieson 1983, Watkins 2000). The current study reports two findings: the loss of creaky voice before the subject/object markers and the shift of creaky voice to the right edge of these markers. Okell (1969: 18-21) reports a phonological process called ‘induced creaky tone’, in which a high or low toned syllable becomes a creaky tone. The loss of creaky tone, however, has been unreported in previous studies.

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A phenomenon akin to the induced creaky tone is observed in the current study. An object marker that is underlyingly low tone is realized with creaky voice at the right edge. Moreover, the creaky-toned subject marker has a more pronounced creaky voice at the right edge (compare figure 5.c and figure 6) than the subject marker in the high or low tone contexts.

This shift of creaky voice suggests that creaky voice has a role of demarcation of prosodic boundaries (between words) in the speakers we recorded. All four speakers show the shift of creaky voice to the subject/object markers. In Okell’s study, published in 1969, the induced creaky tone process applies to high or low tone syllables before the object marker /kou/. One hypothesis is that the shift of creaky voice is a process of induced creaky tone but the target of the process has been changed to the subject/object markers.

A detailed study on the shift of creaky voice needs to be designed to confirm this hypothesis. Such a study would combine creaky tone nouns or verbs with low tone markers in order to investigate the systematicity of creaky tone shift observed in the current study. It is likely that this creaky tone shift demarcates a prosodic boundary, which can be tested by recording sentences with lexical items that have more than 3 syllables.

3. Downstep

In the high tone context, a possible downstep has been found in the

object and sometimes in the verb. Downstep occurs when a low tone is present between two high tones (i.e. the second high tone is downstepped) or when two underlying high tones are adjacent (Obligatory Contour Principle, see Bickmore 2000). The sequence of high tone in Burmese is an instance of the second type of downstep.



The object marker has a low tone, but it does not automatically result in a downstep of the high tone of the verbal root. The downstep phenomenon suggests that high tone in Burmese is phonologically active, while low tone is not. In the low tone context, we only observe downdrift (i.e. automatic downstep).

The presence of downstep is not unexpected, but further studies are called for. The current study only involves short lexical items with a simple sentence type. Future studies need to investigate lexical items with multiple syllables in order to understand the exact nature of the downstep in Burmese.

VI. Conclusion

This paper reports experimental results of a study that investigates the

effects of case markers on Burmese intonation. First, the presence of a case marker induces an f0 peak at the left edge of a case marker. Second, a peak in f0 appears after the subject, but not necessarily after the object. Third, creaky voice of the subject and the object shifts to the right edge of a case marker. Fourth, a sequence of high-toned syllables shows downstep.

These findings are one of the first steps in understanding the relationship between tone and intonation in Burmese. A future study is warranted, which will examine sentences that vary tones of constituents within a sentence.

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< References> We would like to thank Jeremy Perkins for his comments. This paper has

been written with a partial support from the CCSU-AAUP University Research grant to Seunghun J. Lee.

References

Bernot, Denise. 1963. ‘Esquisse d’une description phonologique du birman’, Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 58, 164-224.

Bickmore, Lee S. 2000. Downstep and Fusion in Namwanga. Phonology 17: 297-331.

Boersma, Paul and David Weenink. 2013. Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 5.3.57, retrieved from http://www.praat.org/.

Bradley, David. 1982. ‘Register in Burmese’, in D. Bradley (ed.), Papers in South-East Asian Linguistics 8: Tonation, Pacific Linguistics Series A-62, pp. 117-132. Canberra: The Australian National University.

Green, Antony. 2005. ‘Word, Foot, and Syllable Structure in Burmese’, in J. Watkins (ed.), Studies in Burmese linguistics in Honour of John Okell, pp. 1-25. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. Available on-line at http://roa.rutgers.edu ; ROA-551-1002.

Gruber, James. 2012. An articulatory, acoustic and auditory study of Burmese tone. Ph.D. dissertation. Georgetown University.

Gruber, James and Zhaleh Feizollahi. 2006. ‘Pitch and Voice Quality in Burmese Vowels’, paper presented at the 151st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Providence, RI, June 2006. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119.5, 3393.

Javkin, Hector and Ian Maddieson. 1983. ‘An inverse filtering study of Burmese creaky voice’, UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 57,



115-134. Los Angeles: UCLA Department of Linguistics. Lee, Seunghun. 2007. ‘The effects of glottal stops on tone in Burmese,’ in

Proceedings of the 43rd Chicago Linguistics Society. Mehnert, Dieter and Eberhardt Richter (1972, 1973, 1976, 1977).

‘Untersuchungen zur Phonetik und Phonologie des modernen Burmesischen’, Zeitschrift fur Phonetik, Sprach-wissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 25, 306-325; 26, 675-690; 29, 145-166; 30, 514-534.

Okell, John. 1969. A Reference Grammar of Colloquial Burmese, Volumes 1-2. London: Oxford University Press.

Richter, Eberhardt. 1967. ‘Experimentelle Untersuchungen zur Theorie der Toneme im sprachlichen System des modernen Burmesischen’, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl Marx Universtitat: Gesellschafts und Sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe 16.1-2, 219-223.

San San Hnin Tun & Matthias Jenny. 2012. Differential subject marking in colloquial Burmese. Handout from SEALS 22. Available at http://jseals.org/seals22/jenny2012differentialp.pdf.

Sprigg, R.K. 1957. ‘Junction in spoken Burmese’, in Studies in Linguistic Analysis (Special volume of the Philological Society), pp. 104-138. Oxford: W. S. Allen.

Thein Tun. 1982. ‘Some acoustic properties of tones in Burmese’, in D. Bradley (ed.) Papers in South-East Asian Linguistics 8: Tonation, Pacific Linguistics Series A-62, pp. 117-132. Canberra: Australian National University.

Thurgood, Graham. 1981. Notes on the Origins of Burmese Creaky Tone. Monumenta Serindica. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

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International Phonetic Association 31.2, 291-295. Watkins, Justin. 2005a. ‘Notes on Creaky and Killed Tone in Burmese’,

SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics 10, 139-149. London: Department of Linguistics, School of Oriental and African Studies.

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ABSTRACT


an experimental study

Seunghun J. Lee

(Central Connecticut State University)

Phyu Phyu Win

(Bilingual Language Center, Myanmar)

This paper reports what, if any, effects of optional subject and object case markers have on intonation in Burmese. Declarative sentences are recorded with four variables: presence of both case markers, only one of the case markers and absence of both case markers. The results show that there is a small peak in pitch at the juncture between subject/object and the case markers. Additionally, two previously unreported phenomena were observed. First, downstep was found in the high tone context. Second, in the creaky voice context, a linear shift of creaky voice from the creaky voice morpheme to a non-creaky voice suffix was found.

Key Words: Burmese, intonation, tone, creaky voice, downstep

▸ 2014.08.18

▸ 2014.08.21

▸ 2014.09.12

82 東南亞硏究 24 1

초록

버마어 평서문 억양에 나타나는 격조사의 영향: 실험음성학 연구

이승훈

(센트랄 코네티컷 주립 대학교, 미국)

퓨 퓨 윈

(이중언어센터, 미얀마)

본고는 수의적인 주격조사와 목적격 조사가 버마어 억양에 어떤

영향을 미치는지에 대해서 논의한다. 평서문 문장을 네 가지 변수를

고려하여 녹음을 하였다. 주격과 목적격 조사가 모두 있는 경우,

주격 조사와 목적격 조사 중 하나만 있는 경우, 그리고 격조사가

없는 경우. 분석결과 주어/목적어와 따라오는 격조사가 이어지는

지점에 F0 의 돋울림이 관찰되었다. 이에 덧붙여, 선행연구에서

다루지 않았던 두 현상을 보고한다. 첫째, 고성조 문맥에서

downstep 이 관찰되었다. 둘째, creaky voice 전이가 creaky

voice 를 기저형으로 지닌 형태소에서 그렇지 않은 접사로

관찰되었다.

주제어: 버마어, 억양, 성조, creaky voice, downstep

effects of case markers on burmese declarative intonation: an experimental study

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