Changing against tone merging trends in community? the case of C. Y. Leung

Compared to the voluminous literature of soundchange and variation across speakers andgenerations, much less is understood aboutchange and variation within individuals acrossthe lifespan. In this paper, we present a study ofthe Cantonese speech of a public figure, Mr.Chun-ying Leung (1954-), recorded over a spanof three decades (1984-2013), which coincideswith a period when multiple sound changeswere in progress in Hong Kong Cantonese,including the merging of tones. Assisted withautomatic segmentation and annotation, 13,389tokens representing 878 unique characters withunchecked tones were measured for F0. Ourresults show that instead of merging tones,Leung made increasingly greater distinction inthe past three decades between potential tonemerging targets, exhibiting sound changes inthe opposite directions of the ongoing changesin the community.