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2 - Tonal representation and tonal processes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2009

Matthew Y. Chen
Affiliation:
City University of Hong Kong
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Summary

Tone sandhi come in all sizes and shapes. In our survey of the multifarious types of sandhi processes, we must be selective by necessity. Recent tonal studies have shifted focus from the formulation of sandhi rules to the representation of tones in the hope that what form sandhi rules eventually take will follow naturally from an appropriately enriched representation of tone. Accordingly, I will focus on those sandhi phenomena that shed light on the nature and representation of tone.

Tonal representation

In virtually all Chinese linguistic literature, tonal categories are consistently classified by two sets of descriptive terms: one denoting pitch height (high/low or “yin”/“yang”), the other pitch movement (rising, falling, dipping etc.). This practice implies that tone consists of two independent, orthogonal dimensions: register and pitch contour – or to use a musical analog: key and melody. The same tune or musical phrase can be transposed an octave up or down, or from one key to another (say from C to Eb) without losing its melodic identity. This bi-partition of tonal properties is already implicit in Wang (1967), where [high, central, mid] constitute one subset of features in contraposition to [rising, falling, concave, convex]. But internally unstructured feature matrices, consistent with the prevailing descriptive model at the time, provided no formal means to segregate these two subsets of features. With Yip (1980) this implicit dichotomy between pitch height (register) and pitch movement (contour) entered into the basic vocabulary of theoretical discourse.

Type
Chapter
Information
Tone Sandhi
Patterns across Chinese Dialects
, pp. 53 - 97
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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