Tonogenesis in –A gestural account

Fang Hu Phonetics Lab, Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences [email protected]

Both cluster and contribute to structural complexity in syllable production, but they differ in that the production of is temporally sequential while the production of tone is a simultaneously laryngeal superimposition upon the voiced segments. An intriguing typological observation in Sino-Tibetan languages (or perhaps in all languages in the world) is that non-tonal languages are generally associated with a sequentially complex syllable structure, typically characterized by a complicated set of prevocalic (and postvocalic) consonant clusters, whereas tonal languages are associated with a much simpler syllable structure, typically no consonant clusters or extremely limited in both prevocalic and postvocalic positions. Focusing on , this paper aims to provide a detailed explanation on how the sequential structural complexity, consonant clusters, develops into a laryngeal complexity, tones. As is well documented in the literature, modern Tibetan languages exhibit a variegated scenario of tonal developments: they constitute a tonality continuum from completely atonal to highly tonal such that there is no clear dichotomy between a tonal and an atonal language (Huang, 1994; Sun, 1997). Lhasa Tibetan occurs as a highly developed tone language at a cost that it lost nearly all historical consonant clusters as well as the voicing distinction among the prevocalic . The acoustic data show that Lhasa has six phonetic tonal melodies: long high level, long low rising, short high falling, short low rising, checked high falling, and checked low rising. Roughly, tonal register contrast results from historical prevocalic voicing distinction that is further developed from the simplification of the prevocalic consonant clusters; tonal duration contrast correlates with different syllable types. Based on a comparative analysis of Tibetan languages in the tonality continuum, it is argued that a stepwise simplification of the prevocalic consonant clusters triggers the tone, whereas the other factors are not crucial in Tibetan tonogenesis. For instance, the simplification of the postvocalic consonant clusters may help define tonal contour and differences in rhyme duration may affect pitch alignment, and thus both contribute to the further development of tone. In addition to the acoustic study, a pilot EMA study is conducted. An examination of the gestural coordination among tone, , initial and final consonant from two Lhasa speakers reveals that the tone gesture behaves like a consonant, rather than a vowel gesture, which is supportive to the proposed hypothesis in the present study that the tone, the laryngeal complexity, emerges from the simplification of consonant clusters, the sequential structural complexity. References Gao, Man. (2008). Gestural coordination among vowel, consonant and tone gestures in . In Proceedings of the 8th Phonetics Conference of . Hombert, J.-M., Ohala, J. J. and Ewan, W. G. (1979). Phonetic explanations for the development of tones. Language 55: 37-58. Huang, Bufan. (1994). Conditions for tonogenesis and tone split in Tibetan dialects. Minzu Yuwen 3:1-9. English translation by Sun, Jackson T.-S. in Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 18: 43-62, 1995. Sun, Jackson T.-S. (1997). The typology of tone in Tibetan. Chinese Languages and Linguistics IV: Typological Studies of Languages in China (Symposium Series of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Number 2), 485-521. Taipei: Academia Sinica. Sun, Jackson T.-S. (2003). Variegated tonal developments in Tibetan. In Bradley, D., LaPolla, R., Michailovsky, B. and Thurgood, G. (eds.) Language variation: papers on variation and change in the Sinosphere and in the Indosphere in honour of James A. Matisoff, 35-51. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.