刊物属性
  • 刊物名称:校园英语
  • 国内刊号:CN 13-1298/G4
  • 国际刊号:ISSN 1009-6426
  • 邮发代号: 18-116
  • 数据库收录:中国知网
  • 投稿邮箱:
      bianji@xiaoyuanyingyu.com
  • 作者:校园英语杂志社 字数:2723 点击:

      【Abstract】The alternation of [l] and [n] is one of the phonological features that distinguish Sichuan English speakers from other Mandarin English speaking groups. This study aims to explore whether the alternation is random, or if it is not, what are the conditions that influence the alternation. The data are from 12 college graduates, who are asked to read a word list as well as a short story containing target sounds. Results show that the alternation is not random. The more frequent direction is [l] changing into [n], and sounds on the right changing into the one on the left.
      【Key words】[l] and [n]; Sichuan English
      Introduction
      In the beginning of the movie My Fair Lady, Professor Higgins impresses everyone with his ability to tell a person’s birthplace by the way they speak. He attributes this ability to the “science of speech” (Cukor, 1964), which in fact refers to the phonetic features that speakers from different places have. Not only can people’s first language be evidence of their hometown, their second language can also give a clue. One intriguing observation is that native Sichuan dialect speakers tend to have distinctive ways of articulating [l] and [n] when speaking English. To date, few literature is available to account for the rules underlying the alternation.
      As for whether [l] and [n] are interchangeable in Sichuan dialect, the opinions vary. Some scholars suggest that [n] in Sichuan dialect functions as [n] and [l] in Standard Mandarin (Wang 1994,, Zhou 2001), and Wang (1994) states that [n] in Sichuan dialect is different from the nasal consonant [n] in Standard Mandarin. Instead, it is a nasalized [l], namely, [l?]. However, Ma & Tan (1998) points out that [l] and [n] both exists in Sichuan dialect, and they are in free variation. Besides, one of the participants interviewed, who is a native speaker of Sichuan dialect, maintains that [l] and [n] are two distinct consonants that are not interchangeable.
      Inspired by Hung (2000), who finds that [l] and [n] alternation in Hong Kong English is not random, the present study addresses the following questions:
      1. Is alternation of [l] and [n] in English among Sichuan speakers random?
      2. If there are rules that underlie the alternation, what are the patterns?
      There are two hypotheses: first, when [l] or [n] is in the onset position, the following vowel might affect the alternation; second, when the target sounds are in the middle, the phonological environment might be influential.
     

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