The Representation of Tone

Abstract

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2009) The Representation of Tone Larry M. Hyman University of California, Berkeley Submitted to Marc van Oostendorp, Colin Ewen, Elizabeth Hume, and Keren Rice (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Phonology • April 2009 1. Introduction 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 out of its marginal status to occupy center stage leading to 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), H(igh) L(ow) HL (falling) LH (rising) Awa na ‘breast’ na ‘house’ nâ ‘taro’ pa& ‘fish’ (Loving 1966:25) Jingpho H mu0 55 ‘word’ M(id) mu 33 ‘delicious’ L mu 31 ‘to see’ HL nu 51 ‘mother’ (Qingxia & Diehl 2003:401) Falam paa ‘mushroom’ kee ‘leg’ sâa ‘animal’ zu& u ‘bear’ (pers. notes) Obokuitai kuik 1 ‘rock’ kuik ‘insect’ (sp.) kuik 12 ‘lizard’ (sp.) (Jenison & Jenison 1991:85) Ayutla Mixtec H-H s& i 1 nu/ 1 ‘pineapple’ H-L s& i 1 ni/ 3 ‘hat’ M-L s& i 2 ni/ 3 ‘head’ L-L ti 3 ku/ 3 ‘louse’ (Pankratz & Pike 1967:291) the assumption in early generative phonology was that tones consisted of features which could be added at the bottom a segmental (e.g. vowel) feature matrix, as in (3). a. H tone /a/ +syll -cons +back +low + HIGH b. HL falling tone /â/ +syll -cons +back +low + FALLING A major representational problem was how to account for the properties of contour tones. Although falling and rising tones could be expressed by combining accents (â, a& ) or numerals (31, 13 etc.), features such as [± FALLING ] and [± RISING ] fail to capture what is known as “edge effects”: a high to low falling tone acts like a H(igh) tone with respect to what precedes, but as a L(ow) tone with respect to what follows. Similarly, a low to high rising tone acts like a L tone