Abstract
Abstract It is generally believed that all languages, no matter how tonal, have grammatical intonation of some kind. A fall in pitch at the end of ordinary declarative sentences is thought to be universal. Hong Kong Cantonese has six contrastive tones, two rising and four level, according to the impressionistic account given here. The experimental results presented here indicate that sentence-final tone lowering does occur in Cantonese while contrastive stress apparently does not have a significant effect on pitch. In addition, it appears that although intelligibility is somewhat worse sentence-finally than sentence-medially, the tonal distinctions are not neutralized in final position.
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