iGeneration Variety

This chapter presents a corpus-based study of the segmental and tonal accents in the iGeneration’s Taiwanese Southern Min (iTSM). Segmentally, iTSM speakers exhibit several distinctive phonological processes. Stop codas in checked syllables are elided, followed by resyllabification rather than gemination. Labial nasal codas are coronalized, while coronal nasal codas are velarized. Velarized nasal codas undergo gemination, while coronalized codas resist it. Labial nasal codas resyllabify to the following onsets. Voiced velar stop onsets, the most marked in the voiced stop series, are often elided or nasalized before nasal vowels, while less marked voiced labial stops and laterals are preserved. Nasalization in iTSM, both intra- and inter-syllabic, shows non-crisp edge phenomena, contrasting with TSM’s crisp edge phenomenon. Tonally, stop coda elision results in the loss of checked tones, shifting to smooth tones with compensatory vowel lengthening. The study also shows that iTSM speakers prefer parsing longer expressions into tetrasyllabic or shorter fragments, which function as phonological phrases and constrain the application of tone sandhi. This phrasing process is sensitive to syntactic adjuncthood and syllable count.