Syllable Contractions in a Mandarin Conversational Dialogue Corpus

JB[v.20020404] Prn:24/01/2005; 15:52 F: IJC10104.tex / p.1 (56-126) Syllable Contractions in a Mandarin
Conversational Dialogue Corpus Shu-Chuan Tseng Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, Taiwan The issue of processing and understanding spontaneous speech interests
speech engineers and linguists, because spontaneous speech is the most
natural and the most frequent form of language used for communication.
However, the lack of well-dened databases of spontaneous speech prohibits
the scale and the depth of spontaneous speech research to a great extent. By
using the methodology of corpus linguistics, this paper shows that linguistic
theories can be examined, approved or disproved by quantitative empirical
analyses. The studies introduced in this paper contain a pioneering work on
corpus-based analyses of syllable contractions in spontaneous Mandarin by
construing spontaneous Mandarin database incorporated with linguistic
considerations into the spontaneous speech phenomena. Corpus-based
results presented in this paper not only conrm characteristics of syllable
contraction with respect to Chinese phonology, but also provide new insights
into lexical factors that inuence the production of syllable contractions. Keywords: spoken language corpora, spontaneous speech, syllable
contractions, Mandarin Chinese . Introduction Spontaneous speech contains a wide variety of pronunciation reductions, be-
cause in casual speech speakers tend to utter sentences in a relaxed way with
the least possible amount of articulation effort. Because spontaneous speech
is the most natural and the most frequent form of language use for commu-
nication, the issue of processing and understanding of spontaneous speech is
of great interest for speech engineers and linguists. However, little knowledge
about the details of spontaneous speech is available due to the lack of databases. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics : (), . -

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