Zhangzhou Implosives and Their Variations (2022)

Abstract: Zhangzhou Southern Min employs the airstream mechanism of glottalic ingressive as a contrastive feature in its onset system. However, their realisations are highly diverse with eleven phonetic variants that can be derived from three implosive phonemes (/ɓ, ɗ, ɠ/). The allophonic variations are regressively motivated by three driving factors comprising the nasal [Ṽ], labial-velar [u, w], and palatal [i, j] characteristics of subsequent segments. Several processes that include labialisation, nasalisation, lenition, laminalisation, dentalisation and palatalisation have been found to trigger alternation on the airstream mechanism, manner of articulation, and place of articulation of related sounds, resulting in diverse phonetic outputs of the three implosives phonemes that can be captured using phonological rules.

## introduction human languages exploit various dimensions to characterise consonants, which comprise place of articulation, manner of articulation, nasality, laterality, phonation, voicing status of the glottis, aspiration, and airstream mechanism, among others @xcite . each dimension can further classify consonants into several different sub-categories. for example, the airstream mechanism can group consonants into pulmonic egressive, glottalic egressive (ejective), glottalic ingressive (implosive), and velaric ingressive (click), which are lexically observed around the world, depending on where the airstream is initiated, lungs, glottis, or tongue, and in which direction the airstream flows, outward or inward @xcite . the sinitic dialect of zhangzhou southern min, spoken in the south fujian province of mainland china, is found to employ two types of airstream mechanisms in its consonantal system. in addition to the general type of pulmonic egressive, three implosive sounds (/ɓ, ɗ, ɠ/) are synchronically used to distinguish lexical items however, it may be because of their special mechanism that is only found in 13% of the world's languages, and the continuous motion of organ apparatus in speech production, the realisations of implosive phonemes are observed to be highly diverse, with eleven variants being derived at the surface level, covering five different places of articulation, and four types of the manner of articulation, as shown in ## allophonic variation of implosives while having a relatively small size of onset inventory, the realizations of individual phonemes in zhangzhou are found to be diverse, motivated by various factors, resulting in several variants at the surface level. for example, as indicated in figure 3 , the bilabial implosive /ɓ/ is weakened to a voiced bilabial fricative [β] when it precedes the rounded back vowel [u], shifted to the labial nasal [m] before nasal vowels, while realized as an implosive [ɓ] elsewhere. similarly, the alveolar implosive /ɗ/ is found to have four variants of [ɗ̪ , lʷ, n, ɗ], while the velar implosive /ɠ/ is realised differently with four variants of @xcite . though phonetically very different, the variants of the implosive phonemes are in complementary distribution, and their occurrences are predictably conditioned by three main factors comprising the palatal [i] and[j], the bilabial ([u]), and the nasality feature of nasal vowels @xcite , as summarized in ## conclusion as discussed, zhangzhou southern min employs the airstream mechanism of glottalic ingressive as a contrastive feature in its onset system; but their realisations are highly diverse with eleven phonetic variants that can be derived from three implosive phonemes. the allophonic variation presents regular and predictable patterns under the regressive assimilatory influence of three factors comprising the nasal @xcite , and palatal [i, j] characteristics of subsequent segments. the nasal factor alters the airstream mechanism from glottalic ingressives to pulmonic egressives and changes the manner of articulation to be nasal. the labial-velar factor affects the implosives at different extents depending on their place of articulation. it triggers a lenition process on the bilabial implosive, coupling processes of lenition and labialization on the velar implosive but induces more complex effects on the alveolar implosive involving labialization, laminalisation and lenition. the two non-alveolar implosives are thus changed to their homorganic voiced fricative counterparts, while the alveolar implosive is changed to a lateral approximant. the palatal factor shifts the place of articulation of the two non-labial implosives under the influence of dentalisation or palatalization. the diverse allophonic variation of implosives in zhangzhou southern min reflects continuous motions of vocal apparatus in the production of human speech sounds, which causes considerable overlapping in articulatory gestures and leads to dynamic physical outputs to individual phonemes @xcite . the discussion of this article directly broadens our understanding of the phonetics and phonology of implosives in this dialect, while demonstrating how diverse factors alter their phonetic outputs in terms of airstream mechanism, place of articulation, and manner of articulation. it is hoped to contribute valuable empirical data to the typology of implosives as a special language phenomenon and shed important light on the typology of sound changes that are synchronically motivated.