This paper discusses the nature of
syllable final nasals in Mandarin Chinese as against those in English In light of
phonetic evidence from earlier literature (Xu, 1986) as well as phonological observations by Trigo (1988) of nasal weakening and absorption across a number of typologically different languages, a phonetic experiment was conducted by means of a nasometer, in order to measure the nasality of Mandarin
syllable final nasals in terms of nasolance (nasal / nasal + oral acoustic energy) The results support the hypothesis that Mandarin syllable final nasals are nasal glides instead of nasal stops, evidence being an initial final nasolance difference of over 10% On such basis, I argue that phonologically, the weakened nasal glides should bear the manner feature <+continuant> as against the default value of < continuant> for nasal stops The phonological occurrence of such a nasal glide should be conditioned by their post vocalic syllabic position, and more specifically, by their position immediately next to the nuclear vowel I observe that, since the Mandarin syllable final nasal glide never follows any other postvocalic glide, but rather takes the same position with such a glide, it would be more appropriate to treat it as the post nuclear constituent of a branching nucleus than as a coda that follows the nucleus The English syllable final nasals are different, however They follow both single nuclear vowels and diphthongs As such, they must be of a lower sonority scale than the glide ending of a diphthong, hence a nasal stop They also pattern with other consonantal codas in adding phonological weight to the syllable, whereas Mandarin syllable final nasal glides do not contribute to weight alternation Here lies a typological difference between the English type of languages whose syllabic structure and constituents condition
syllabic weight, and the Mandarin type of languages which lack intrinsic weight altogether Weight is either a lexical property or a prosodic property A syllable could be heavy or light without reference to its rime type and rime structure To this end, I suggest that the five possible postvocalic glides, nasal as well as non nasal, be treated unanimously as off glides of Mandarin diphthongs This way, the Mandarin syllable could be characterized as a simple, CV type of open syllable at the lexical level, and the branching nucleus solution helps to explain why English syllable final nasals resyllabify with their following initial vowels while the Mandarin final nasal glides do not