Issues in the Analysis of Chinese Tone

Abstract

Chinese tone has played an important role in the development of phonological theory from distinctive features and autosegmental phonology to Optimality Theory and its various adaptations. This article reviews some past and current issues in the analysis of Chinese tone and points out how the development of theoretical phonology has shaped the highs and lows of this research enterprise. To fruitfully proceed into the future, I plead to phonologists working in this area to cultivate a new respect for empirical data based on well‐designed phonetic and psycholinguistic studies. This is necessitated by the observations that speakers’ knowledge of tone and tone sandhi may not be identical to their patterns in the lexicon, and impressionistic transcriptions, no matter how careful, can be inaccurate. Moreover, patterns of tone in Chinese are rich in variation, gradience, and exceptions due to dialectal contact and the influence from the dominant Standard Chinese, and existing research has shown that the productivity of Chinese tone sandhi patterns is influenced by both categorical factors such as phonological opacity and gradient factors such as the phonetic nature and the frequency of usage of the sandhi. An empirical basis built around these issues will allow the study of Chinese tone to make continued contributions to the development of phonological theory and our understanding of speakers’ phonological knowledge.

Tone Sandhi and Tonal Coarticulation in Tianjin Chinese

“…Our tone sandhi results also echo the sentiment in Zhang [2010] about the prevalence of variations and exceptions in Chinese tone sandhi patterns. Due to the influence of the dominant dialect SC, the increasingly close contacts among different dialects of Chinese, and the differences between literary and colloquial pronunciations in many Chinese dialects, variations and exceptions are par for the course for tone sandhi as well as many other phonological patterns in Chinese.…”

“…Our acoustic study on tonal realizations of Tianjin highlights the value of detailed acoustic studies to our understanding of tone patterns, a point also made in Zhang [2010]. The phonetic nature of tones in the inventory of Tianjin has been a contentious issue from the get-go and different researchers have made different assumptions about their representations, often based on impressionistic transcriptions.…”

“…This study reports the acoustic patterns of tone in Tianjin Chinese, a dialect spoken in the city of Tianjin 65 miles to the southeast of Beijing. Despite its similarity to SC, Tianjin has a considerably more complex pattern of tone sandhi -phonological alternations of tones due to tonal, prosodic, or morphosyntactic environments in which the tones appear [Chen, 2000;Zhang, 2010] -than SC. Moreover, tone sandhis in Tianjin exhibit a fair amount of variation, making an already complex picture even more puzzling.…”

The role of phonological alternation in speech production: Evidence from Mandarin tone Sandhi

“…Mandarin has four lexical contour tones, which are phonologically distinctive: for example, shou 1 means "collect", shou 2 means "ripe", shou 3 "hand", and shou 4 "receive" (Zhang, 2010). 1 Chen and colleagues (2002;see also O'Seaghdha et al, 2010;Zhang, 2008) have shown that tone is relevant for implicit priming.…”

The role of phonological alternation in speech production: evidence from Mandarin tone sandhi

“…Mandarin has four lexical contour tones, which are phonologically distinctive: for example, shou 1 means “collect”, shou 2 means “ripe”, shou 3 “hand”, and shou 4 “receive” (Zhang, 2010). 1 Chen and colleagues (2002; see also O’Seaghdha et al, 2010; Zhang, 2008) have shown that tone is relevant for implicit priming.…”