Tonal and prosodic changes in Mainland Southeast Asia

Mainland Southeast Asia is a linguistic area, in which languages from diverse family converge so that they become typologically homogeneous. Tonal and prosodic features such as lexical tones, register, monosyllabicism, sesquisyllabicity, iambicity figure quite prominently among areal features that set Mainland Southeast Asia from neighboring regions. Adopting both experimental and more traditional approaches, we explore the interplay between phonetics, phonology, and contact in areal diachronic phenomena such as

Tonal contour changes
Transphonologization of tonal and prosodic contrast
Shifts of word-level prominence toward iambicity
Monosyllabization and sesquisyllabization

These phenomena are examined using various approaches including laboratory phonology, diachronic phonology, and variationist sociolinguistics.

Selected Publications

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

Kirby, J., Pittayaporn, P. & Brunelle, M. (2022). Transphonologization of onset voicing: revisiting Northern and Eastern Kmhmu’. Phonetica, 79(6), 591-629. https://doi.org/10.1515/phon-2022-0029

Yang, C., Pittayaporn, P., Kirby, J., & Jitwiriyanont, S. Change and stability in the tonal contours of King Rama IX of Thailand, 1959. Proceedings of 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI).

Burroni, F., Maspong, S., Pittayaporn, P., & Kochaiyaphum, P. (2020). A new look at Pattani Malay Initial Geminates: a statistical and machine learning approach. In Proceedings of the 34th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (pp. 21-29).

Jitwiriyanont, S. (2019). Formant frequency normalization for studying vowel variation in Thai. Journal of Language and Culture, Vol. 38, No. 2.

Pittayawat, Pittayaporn. (2018). Quantitative and qualitative restrictions on the distribution of lexical tones in Thai. In K. Nishiyama, H. Kishimoto, and E. Aldridge (eds.), Topics in Theoretical Asian Linguistics: Studies in honor of John B. Whitman, 371-386. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.