Mike Opper 欧迈珂
Department of Linguistics
University of Michigan
My research is data-oriented. I focus on phonological, morphological, and lexical patterns in languages of the Sino-Tibetan family. One of the major goals in my research is to interpret linguistic data prepared by scholars working in the Chinese tradition into Western linguistic frameworks. I originally became interested in the Sinitic (Chinese dialects) branch of this language family as an undergraduate student at Rutgers University under Richard VanNess Simmons. I still work on Standard Chinese, but my fieldwork interest has shifted from the Chinese dialects in Southeastern China to the Minority languages spoken in Southwestern China. Below I list my research projects on these languages. Some papers and presentations for these projects can be found on my academia page.
Standard Chinese (Sinitic: Mandarin)
Standard Chinese is the language I have worked on the longest. My primary research on Standard Chinese analyzes the productive truncation patterns in this language such as gōngjiāo 公交 for gōnggòng jiāotōng 公共交通 ‘public transportation’. I have also worked on quantifying the amount of Japanese loanwords in the Modern Chinese lexicon.
Bai (Sino-Tibetan: Unclassified)
Bai varieties are unclassified within the Sino-Tibetan language family and are spoken primarily in Yunnan Province, China. My dissertation is titled Phonological Contrast in Bai. In this work I study the phonological system of Bai (focusing on Southern Bai) from a cross-dialectal perspective. Three aspects of Bai phonology are considered. The first aspect is similar to an issue in the phonology of Standard Chinese. That is, there is ambiguity regarding the phonemic status of the palatal class. I suggest that this class is allophonic with the dental sibilants and base my argument on phonemic, phonotactic, and word-formation evidence. The second aspect of my dissertation research examines the cross-dialect variation in the vowel system of Southern Bai. I document two innovative vowel inventories with reference to function-load of contrast. The last aspect of my dissertation studies the ongoing mergers in the tonal system of Southern Bai. The complete system has eight tones [55, 44, 33, 31, 32, 35, 42, 21]. Tone [32] is lost in the speech of many speakers; I propose that this tone has a low function-load as there are few minimal pairs contrasting this tone with the other tones. Tones [33] and [31] are phonetically-similar and are undergoing merger for many speakers.
Samei, Samadao, Sanie (Tibeto-Burman: Ngwi)
These three languages are spoken in enclaves of ethnic Yi in Kunming. I have worked most extensively on Samei and my sketch of this language will appear in their district almanac. I did a mutual-intelligibilty study in the Recorded-Texts Tests methodology for these languages and found that there is no degree of mutual-intelligibility between these languages despite close geographic proximity and many cognate words.
Taiwan Hakka (Sinitic: Hakka)
Taiwan Hakka is the first language I worked on. I wrote my Bachelor's thesis on this language and focused on the morpho-phonological alternations exhibted by nominal suffocation. This work also documents an unusual onset inventory containing elements of Sixian and Hailu Hakka for the variety spoken in Guanxi Township.
Gan (Sinitic: Gan)
Unpublished field survey. Elicited 2,000 lexical items from one native speaker of Poyang dialect.