Center of Excellence in Southeast Asian Linguistics
Sireemas Maspong

Selected Publications

An exploratory investigation of interactions between syllabic prominence, initial geminates, and phrasal boundaries in Pattani Malay

This study investigates interactions among relative syllabic prominence, initial geminates (IGs), and prosodic boundaries in Pattani Malay (PM) against a background of previous analyses claiming that IGs are moraic and trigger a ‘stress shift’ or the linking of a pitch accent to the initial syllable. We conducted an acoustic study with 14 PM speakers, producing singleton–IG minimal pairs in naturalistic sentences. Our results show that the presence of IGs is not associated with the hypothesized phonological changes. Instead, it is associated with moderate increases in the duration of initial syllables, the intensity of the initial syllable vowels, and the f0 of the initial and final syllable vowels. On the other hand, the presence of a phrase-final prosodic boundary correlates with more drastic changes: in phrase-final position, final syllables exhibit final lengthening and falling contours of f0 and intensity, while, in the phrase-medial position, no lengthening is observed and f0 contours are rising. Furthermore, the effects of IGs are strongest in the phrase-final position, suggesting interactions between IGs and prosodic boundaries. Taken together, results cast doubts on the claim that IGs are moraic and associated with categorical differences in syllabic prominence profiles in PM and show that IGs effects are modulated by prosodic boundaries.

Dating vowel lengthening in Thai

This paper dates vowel lengthening in Thai, which affected words that originally had a long vowel such as cʰaːw4 ‘morning’, naːm4 ‘water’, maːj4 ‘wood’, and daːj3 ‘to acquire’. Analysis of data from rhymming patterns in poetry, and from dictionaries and grammar books for foreigners shows that the vowel lengthening began in the late 24th century

Survey and Selection of Texts for Thai National Historical Corpus

This article reports on the pilot project for the Thai National Historical Corpus, a diachronic corpus that represents the different stages of the Thai language. Three important decisions were made as a result of the project. First, the texts will be selected according to the criteria designed for the British