Tone: Is it Different?

Abstract

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2007) • DRAFT prepared for The Handbook of Phonological Theory, 2nd Ed., Blackwell (John Goldsmith, Jason Riggle & Alan Yu, eds) • Comments welcome Tone: Is it Different? Larry M. Hyman University of California, Berkeley Introduction Except for a brief period in the late 1970s and early 1980s, tone has generally fallen outside the central concerns of theoretical phonology. During that period, the concepts and formalisms of Goldsmith’s (1976a,b) autosegmental approach to tone provided the model to address other aspects of “non-linear phonology” including vowel harmony (Clements 1977, 1981), nasal harmony (Hyman 1982), and feature geometry (Clements 1985, Sagey 1986). In addition, autosegmental approaches to templatic morphology (McCarthy 1981), reduplication (Marantz 1982), and other aspects of “prosodic morphology” owed their inspiration to tone, which through the work of Pulleyblank (1986) provided important insights into the developing framework of lexical phonology and morphology (Kiparsky 1982, 1985; Mohanan 1986). Most generative work prior to and during this period had centered around African tone systems (Leben 1973a, Hyman & Schuh 1974, Goldsmith 1976, Clements & Ford 1979, Clements & Goldsmith’s 1984), two notable exceptions being Haraguchi (1977) and Yip (1980), who dealt with the tonal dialectology of Japanese and Chinese, respectively. Finally, Pierrehumbert (1980) developed an influential autosegmental approach to intonation based on English, which was subsequently applied to Japanese (Beckman & Pierrehumbert 1986) and many other languages since. While the autosegmental legacy is still quite alive, tone has not contributed as centrally to subsequent theoretical innovations in phonology. In the case of optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993, McCarthy 2002), there have been some interesting applications, e.g. Myers’ (1997) treatment of the obligatory contour principle (OCP), but theoretical developments have largely been based either on segmental phonology or on stress, syllabification, reduplication and other aspects of prosodic phonology and morphology. My goal in writing this chapter is twofold. First, I propose to cover some of the aforementioned contributions that tone has made to phonological theory. Second, I wish to show that there is still much more for phonologists and others to learn from tone. I suggest that linguists should be very concerned about tone, for at least three reasons: (i) Tone systems are found in approximately 50% of the languages of the world. The greatest concentrations of “tone languages” are found in Sub-Saharan Africa, East and Southeast Asia, Southcentral Mexico, and parts of Amazonia and New Guinea. While we have had access to information about the first three areas for some time, comparatively little has been available on tone in Amazonia and New Guinea until recently. The emerging picture is that these tone sytems have interesting and diverse properties which complement the already varied African, Asian, and Mexican systems. The result is an extraordinary richness and a potential gold mine for future investigations. (ii) The study of tone has influenced the history of phonology and promises to contribute further to our understanding of language in general, particular as concerns interface issues. For instance, some of the most detailed and influential studies concerning the syntax-phonology