The Tonal Phonology of Chinese

M. J. W. Yip, 1980

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This study sets out to construct a fully articulated theory of the phonology of tone, encompassing both the formal properties of tonal rules, and a feature system for tone. To counter-balance the African bias of earlier work, data are drawn mainly from Chinese and other East Asian languages. The first portion contains evidence that tone is autosegmental in Chinese languages as it is in African languages: the phenomena of stability, floating tones and toneless morphemes are shown to exist in Mandarin, Shanghai, Cantonese and Amoy. This is followed by a demonstration of the close relationship between tone and other prosodic phenomena such as stress and metrics.

The second portion constructs a binary feature system for tone based on two hierarchically organized features, each of which is autosegmental. Historical, typological and synchronic evidence are used to show that this system solves several long-standing problems in the study of tone.

The final portion includes a detailed analysis of the tonology of five languages – Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghai, Amoy and Fuzhou – within the framework developed in the earlier sections.