Pat Callier

Honors student in Linguistics

Faculty Honors Advisor: Penny Eckert

A Corpus Study of Sentence-Final me: "Cosmopolitan" Mandarin?

Erbaugh (1985) notes that in many East Asian languages, many speakers believe sentence-final particles are more frequently used by women than by men. She speculates that if men and women's usage actually reflects this stereotype, it is a product of the burden placed on women's shoulders to facilitate smooth interaction in conversation. I focus on one modal particle of Mandarin Chinese: me, which is sometimes described as marking the obviousness of an utterance.

With a corpus study of conversational Mandarin, using two separate corpora, I also examine the relationship between me frequency and speakers' region of origin, perceived accent, among other factors. I show that, in Mainland China, me's use is generally favored by (young) women compared to other gender and age demographics, while three other particles — a/ya, ba, and la — show no differentiation in use according to sex and age. In both Mainland China and Taiwan, speakers perceived as having southern regional accents produce more me than speakers with other accents, though Taiwanese speakers produce more me than Mainlanders overall.

I argue against describing me as merely a particle for smoothing out interaction, and rule out an account of its gender distribution based on this misleading generalization. Following more recent work in language, gender, and sociolinguistic variation, in particular Zhang (2005), and supported by additional corpus data, I suggest that me's sociolinguistic distribution can be better understood as a resource in the creation of linguistic styles. In this account, megains significance as a salient feature of Taiwanese or Southern Mandarin, and speakers use it in the course of a linguistic presentation that draws on the symbolic value of association between Taiwan and Southern China and its transnationally-flavored brand of urban, capitalist modernity.

Ryan Mead

Honors student in Symbolic Systems

Faculty Honors Advisor: Paul Kiparsky

Text-to-Tune Alignment in the Music of La Charanga Habanera

Setting lyrics to music involves the creation of an interface between two distinct rhythmic structures: linguistic prominence (stress) and musical meter (rhythm). Prior scholarship suggests that these two rhythmic hierarchies tend to align themselves in the most straightforward way possible -- stressed syllables will fall on musically strong beats -- but my thesis shows that this generalization does not always hold. I transcribed the lyrics of the first four albums recorded by La Charanga Habanera (hereafter CH), one of the groups that defined the currently popular style of Cuban dance music known as timba. Because of its strong African influence, Cuban music exhibits a high degree of rhythmic complexity, and CH's songs are no exception. The sophisticated rhythms present in CH's music interact with Spanish stress patterns in unexpected but systematic ways, and it is common for lexically stressed syllables to fall on the weakest musical beats. In my paper I formulate some well-formedness constraints that govern the placement of stressed and unstressed syllables within the musical rhythmic hierarchy. I also show how inter-word vowel elision (synalepha), which is the typical pattern in spoken and poetic Spanish, is obligatory in CH's lyrics except under very specific conditions. Finally, I show how the text-to-tune alignment rules established in the first three albums shifted in the fourth, when the group began to incorporate elements of American rap into its music.

Gabe Recchia

Honors student in the Symbolic Systems Program

Faculty Honors Advisor: Joan Bresnan

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