Abstract
Based on the statistics of a corpus of TV show speeches, this paper points out that CCTV News anchors, while broadcasting, tend to pronounce /v/ instead of /u/ in syllables starting with /u/ sound, with the /v/ sound more frequently articulated than the /u/ sound. Analyzing from phonetic rules, the paper maintains that this is not a mispronunciation, but a phonetic variation resulting from the reverse assimilation of the non-round lipped vowel that follows. Due to the presence of /v/ sound in almost all the Chinese dialects, plus the influence from media speech, this variation would bring about a change in phonetic structure of Putonghua, i.e., /u/ would be replaced by /v/ at the beginning of a syllable. Thus there would be a voiced consonant /v/ as against the voiceless /f/.
| Keywords: | mandarin; vowel /u/; consonant /v/; phonetic variation; reverse assimilation |
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