Phonological Features of Tone Author(S): William SY. Wang Source
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Phonological Features of Tone Author(s): William S-Y. Wang Source: International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Apr., 1967), pp. 93-105 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1263953 Accessed: 31/05/2009 22:36 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to International Journal of American Linguistics. http://www.jstor.org International Journal of American Linguistics VOLUMEXXXI TT April 1967 Number 2 PHONOLOGICAL FEATURES OF TONE1 WILLIAMS-Y. WANG UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY 1. General discussion ing the literature on languages of this type, 2. Tone features and segmental features our attention is particularly drawn to three 3. Presentation of phonological features linguistic areas: (i) certain clusters of Ameri- 4. A proposed set of tone features can Indian languages, (ii) the vast majority 5. Redundancy conventions of African languages, and (iii) almost all of 6. Phonetic interpretation the languages of the Sino-Tibetan family 7. Marking conventions together with many neighboring languages 8. Tone circle in Min of Southeast Asian. Typically, tone systems of areas (i) and (ii) differ from those of area 1. 'Tone languages',2 in a broad sense, are (iii) in several ways. found in most parts of the world. In examin- One point of difference is in the use to which tones are put. In languages of area 1 Versions of this paper have been presented to tones are almost used lexi- the at and (iii), exclusively linguistic groups Berkeley, UCLA, with no correlation with the Honolulu. Work discussed in this paper is sup- cally, syntactic ported in part by the Office of Naval Research. I or morphological aspects of the language. am indebted to W. L. Ballard for his assistance in There are exceptions, of course, such as the collecting and systematizing the basic data on tone breathy fall-rise tone in Vietnamese which systems upon which the present discussion is is 'sometimes used to refer and for several discussions on anaphorically based, profitable back to some noun or nominal matters of interpretation. "key" expres- 2 The most comprehensive investigation of tone sion in what has gone before',3 or the modi- languages to date continues to be K. L. Pike's fied tones in several Chinese dialects which book of 1948, though new data have led to criti- serve a variety of connotative as well as cisms of some of Pike's assumptions; e.g. W. E. minor functions.4 in the and tonal syntactic Indeed, Welmers, Tonemics, morphotonemics, dialect there are two dozen or so morphemes, General Linguistics 4.1-9 (Spring, Peking 1949). A lucid discussion on the range of the term morphemes which change grammatical cate- 'tone language' by James D. McCawley in a paper gory according to tone. But these uses are entitled What is a tone language? was presented marginal when they are compared to the ex- to the Linguistic Society of America, August, 1964, tensive load that tones carry in the declen- in which he out that attempts at correctly pointed sional and of typology of this sort should be based primarily on conjugational morphology the abstract form of phonological rules which the many languages in America and Africa, as different tonal structures require. He argued con- exemplified in sections 3.11.2 and 3.11.3 of that with the so-called vincingly languages pitch Nida's Morphology,5 and documented abun- accent, e.g. Japanese, though frequently grouped with tone languages, are much more similar phono- logically to certain non-tone languages. Indeed, it 3 Eugenie J. A. Henderson, Tonal exponents of is an open question whether the distinction be- pronominal concord in Southern Vietnamese, tween these two types of accent can be given any Indian Linguistics 22.86-97 (1961). phonetic foundation. Although this distinction has 4 K. P. K. Whitaker, A Study of the modified played a prominent role at least since Karl Verner tones in Spoken Cantonese, Asia Major 5.9-36, used it as part of his famous historical thesis, our 184-207, (1956). understanding of the physical basis of this distinc- 6 Eugene A. Nida, Morphology, 2nd ed., Ann tion has not advanced much in the past century. Arbor (1949). 93 94 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS VOL. XXXIII dantly in the literature which deals with area (iii), however, is by paradigmatic re- these languages.6 placement. Characteristically, tone x is re- The tone paradigms of languages of area placed by tone y when it is within some (iii) are typically more complex. If we count linguistic environment, and it is irrelevant each distinct pitch shape in citation mono- whether tone y is present elsewhere in the syllables as a tone, then paradigms of 6 or 7 sequence of tones. Frequently the phono- tones are quite common. According to a re- logical environment in which tone x occurs cent study, Cantonese may have as many as is also irrelevant for the sandhi. Some very 10 tones.7 On the other hand, although a few complex situations of paradigmatic sandhi American Indian languages also appear to are found in the Min and Wu dialects of have complex paradigms, languages of areas Chinese, an example of which is given in 8 (i) and (ii) in general do not have as many of this paper. distinct shapes. Most languages of these two areas have simply two or three noncontour 2. Recently I have examined a large num- tones; a relatively small number of these ber of tone languages, mostly of area (iii), languages have contour tones in addition.8 with a view towards constructing a set of Yet another point of difference can be phonological features of tone. These features seen in the way tone sandhi operates. The are proposed here as an addition to a general sequence of tones in many Bantu languages, theory of phonology. They are designed to for example, undergoes a form of sandhi that complement the two dozen or so features is essentially by syntagmatic displacement, which are currently used in the phonological i.e., a kind of tonal 'musical chairs' in which classification of segmental sounds. each syllable receives its tone from its Tone features, of course, are not com- (usually left) neighbor. The sandhi in the pletely independent of the segmental fea- so-called terrace-level tone languages of West tures. They have a particularly close rela- in that Africa is also syntagmatic the sense tion, synchronically and diachronically, with value of an unaccented is the pitch syllable features which are controlled primarily at predicted from the value of the usually pitch the larynx, e.g. voicing, aspiration, glottali- left neighbor.9 Tone sandhi in of languages zation, length, breathiness, etc. This relation 6 See, for example, Robert E. Longacre, Trique is easily understandable since the primary tone morphemics, A L 1.4.5-42 (April, 1959); A. Meeussen, Syntactic tones of nouns in Ganda: a preliminary synthesis, Linguistic Research in this tonal phenomenon within the broader frame- Belgium 77-86, Universa Wetteren, Belgium work of Niger-Congo languages, Lg 37.294-308, (1966). 1961. These African languages are terrace-level 7 Fd-BangZong, On the split of the Yin-ping languages of the descending variety in that the tone in Cantonese(in Chinese),Zhongguo Yuwen pitch of the voice characteristically progresses 132.376-89(1964). from high to low. Eunice Pike recently called 8 Some especially challengingcases are these my attention to a terrace-level language of the MexicanIndian languagesof the Oto-Manguean ascending variety, i.e., the Acatlan dialect of family:Robert E. Longacre,Five phonemicpitch Mixtec, where the voice pitch may be raised an levels in Trique,Acta Linguistica7.62-82 (1952); indefinite number of steps theoretically, by the FrankE. Robbins,Quiotepec Chinantec syllable repeated occurrence of the tone feature 'step-up'. patterning, IJAL 27.237-50(1961); William R. I am grateful to Miss Pike for showing me an Merrifield,Palantla Chinantec syllable types, unpublished paper on this subject, which she A L 5.5.1-16(1963). co-authored with Kent Wistram. The tone features 9 For a clearlypresented example of a terrace- 'step-up' and 'step-down' are not discussed in level tone languagein Ghana,see Paul Schachter, the present study since they call into play a type Phonetic similarity in tonemic analysis, Lg of phonological formalism that remains to be de- 37.231-8(1961). In the same issue of Language, veloped should they prove necessary at the sys- H.