Abstract The Tonal Comparative Method: Tai Tone in Historical Perspective Rikker Dockum 2019 To date, the majority of attention given to sound change in lexical tone has focused on how an atonal language becomes tonal and on early stage tone development, a process known as tonogenesis. Lexical tone here refers to the systematic and obligatory variation of prosodic acoustic cues, primarily pitch height and contour, to encode contrastive lexical meaning. Perhaps the most crucial insight to date in accounting for tonogenesis is that lexically contrastive tone, a suprasegmental feature, is bom from segmental origins. What remains less studied and more poorly understood is how tone changes after it is well established in a language or language family. In the centuries following tonogenesis, tones continue to undergo splits, mergers, and random drift, both in their phonetic realization and in the phonemic categories that underlie those surface tones. How to incorporate this knowledge into such historical linguistic tasks as reconstmction, subgrouping, and language classification in a generally applicable fashion has remained elusive. The idea of reconstmcting tone, and the use of tonal evidence for language classifi­ cation, is not new. However, the predominant conventional wisdom has long been that tone is impenetrable by the traditional Comparative Method. This dissertation presents a new methodological approach to sound change in lexical tone for languages where tone is already firmly established. The Tonal Comparative Method is an extension of the logic of the traditional Comparative Method, and is a method for incorporating tonal evidence into historical analyses in a manner consistent with the first principles of the longstanding Comparative Method. The Tonal Comparative Method is developed and modeled using data drawn from hundreds of doculects (Good & Cysouw 2013) of Tai languages, a branch of the Kra- Dai language family. The Tai languages make an ideal testing ground for advancing the theory of sound change in tone systems because they are robustly tonal, relatively young and well documented, and the segmental origins of the tones are very regular and well understood. The regularity of tonal change within Tai allowed for the creation of the ‘tone box’ (Gedney 1972), a compact visualization of the mapping between the modem tones of any Tai language and the posited historical environments that conditioned tone splits and mergers in that language. The tone box has been in wide use for historical analysis, language documentation, and dialectology in Tai languages for half of a century. Using tone boxes from hundreds of Tai doculects, this dissertation demonstrates that tone systems contain strong phylogenetic signal, a statistical measure of their historical informativity. This dissertation advances theory and practice in historical linguistics, while demon­ strating concrete advances in Tai historical linguistics. The Tai languages thus serve as a model for (1) a more generalized reasoning of why tonal evidence is not only possible to incorporate into a historical analysis, but will be a cmcial element of the best historical analyses going into the future, and (2) how tonal evidence can resolve outstanding issues where predominantly segmental evidence has may have failed to do so. Using the insights of Tonal Comparative Method, we can expect the diachronic explanatory power of tone to extend well beyond the level achieved to date. The Tonal Comparative Method: Tai Tone in Historical Perspective A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Yale University in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Rikker Dockum Dissertation Director: Dr. Claire Bowem December 2019 ProQuest Number: 27542445 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent on the quality of the copy submitted. in the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 27542445 Published by ProQuest LLC (2020). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. Ail Rights Reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 - 1346 © 2019 by Rikker Dockum All rights reserved. Acknowledgments Above all I am deeply grateful to my wife, Kaw, and our children, Leslie and Henry, for all of their patience through the years of my doctoral program. From putting up with the penury of grad school to the many late nights and missed bedtime tuck-ins, I truly cannot imagine surviving this process, let alone thriving in it, without their support. I also owe great thanks to my mother, Lori, and my sisters, Nanette, Nollie, Bekka, Kira, and Kaylee. They have been an unflagging source of positivity and encouragement throughout my graduate school years. I also owe so much of who I am to my late father, John, who has been gone 21 years, and finished his doctorate degree exactly 40 years ago. It is impossible to overstate how much my experience at Yale has been defined by the influence of Claire Bowem. As my mentor from the start of my degree imtil chairing my dissertation committee, I have had the privilege to work with Claire in her lab and to co-teach two courses with her. I have gained immensely from her mentorship. As the Director of Graduate Studies for most of my years in the program, she also shaped the entire linguistics PhD degree at Yale for the better in numerous ways that I benefited from. Under her supervision I became a better researcher, a better writer, a better linguist. It has been an immense joy to be her student, and I hope ever to be her mentee. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the Tai Khamti community at Khamti Township, Sagaing Division, Myanmar. My primary fieldwork consultants, U Kavipala and Sai Aimg Mung, generously shared their language with me over the course of so many hours of recording, transcription, analysis, and translation. They also constantly went above and beyond my expectations in taking such good care of me in the face of torrential rains, flooded guesthouses, and numerous logistical challenges. The entire community welcomed me warmly with a generosity that I cannot forget. After hundreds of days worked and hundreds of mangoes eaten, I could never thank them enough. Special thanks also to the Yale Southeast Asia Council, the Yale MacMillan Center, and the National Science Foundation for funding my fieldwork and archival work in Myanmar and Thailand. Ill Thanks also to the linguists who set me irrevocably on the path to this dissertation: Lindsay Whaley and Ann Charity Hudley taught the first two linguistics classes I ever took, and Dave Peterson and Tim Pulju taught many of the ones that followed. Dave changed my brain when he introduced me to linguistic fieldwork. Thanks to Doug Cooper who saw an eager undergrad and channeled that energy into so many interesting projects. Thanks are also due to the many professors, lecturers, post-docs, researchers, and fellow students who I have come to know at Yale and at conferences around the world. In particular, thanks to Ryan Bennett, who was an important early mentor to me in graduate school. My thanks also to my other committee members: Natalie Weber and Pittayawat (Joe) Pittayapom. Through his stellar historical work, Joe was a huge influence on me well before I started the PhD, and it has been a privilege to have his feedback during this process. This entire experience would not have been possible for me without the camaraderie and commiseration of my peers. I am grateful to have come to Yale with my original cohort: Luke Lindemann, Matt Tyler, and Patrick Patterson. And I’m grateful for the many colleagues and fi-iends who had an impact on me along the way. Both those who came before me, including Emily Gasser, Jason Zentz, Natalie Schrimpf, Ryan Kasak, Alysia Harris, and Sean Gleason, and those who came after me: Josh Phillips, Martm Fuchs, Chris Geissler, Manu Quadros, Sarah Babinski, Andy Zhang, and many others. Thank you, one and all. IV For my wife and children, who have been so very patient. Contents 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Introduction .................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Roadmap of the dissertation ......................................................................... 5 1.3 The Gedney tone b o x ..................................................................................... 7 1.4 Terminology and classification ...................................................................... 9 1.4.1 Language, dialect, lect, doculect ....................................................... 9 1.4.2 ‘Tonogenesis’ vs. ‘tone change’ ....................................................... 9 1.4.3 ISO 639-3 codes and glottocodes .................................................... 10 2 Tai language documentation and dialectology 12 2.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................... 12 2.2 Grey literature in linguistics.......................................................................... 14 2.2.1 Discoverability .................................................................................. 15 2.2.2 Accessibility....................................................................................