The Representation of Tone

Abstract

No issue has had a greater impact on phonological representations than the study of tone. Although receiving only passing attention in both pre‐ and early generative phonology, tone quickly moved away from its marginal status to occupy center stage in the development of non‐linear phonology. While both level and contour tones had been traditionally transcribed with either accents or numerals, as in (1) and (2), the assumption in early generative phonology, e.g. Wang (1967), was that tones consisted of features that could be added at the bottom of a segmental feature matrix, as in (3).