Prosody and Tones of Languages

En los estudios sobre entonación se pone de manifiesto la necesidad de que la fonética experimental cuente con criterios estandarizados para interpretar las mediciones tonales. Uno de estos criterio es el umbral a partir del cual una prominencia tonal puede ser perceptible y/o relevante. Pese a la importancia de esta cuestión no hay unanimidad acerca de las diferencias mínimas perceptibles. El trabajo que sigue presenta un experimento sobre el umbral perceptivo de las diferencias tonales en español peninsular. Los resultados indican que los sujetos pueden discriminar diferencias tonales con diferencias de 1,5 semitonos.

The study explores the grammatical means employed for the expression of information structure in standard colloquial Burmese on the basis of a corpus of written and spoken texts. It analyses the morphosyntactic and prosodic devices identified as relevant for its goals, namely the differential subject and object marking, constituent order, particles used to create a range of interpretations related to the notions of topic, focus and contrast, stand-alone sentence nominalisations and prosody.
The study argues for the existence of a grammatical system of informational PACKAGING in Burmese that has no direct linking to information structural categories like topic, focus and contrast. Expressed by various morphosyntactic means, it segregates information into separate informational units (PACKAGES) and establishes structural relations between them. This partition shows a robust correspondence to prosody.
The PACKAGING system is mobilised for creation of diverse information structure-related interpretive effects through its different configurations and interaction with the context. Concepts like topic, focus, contrast and apparent contrast-degrees observed in Burmese are interpretive outcomes of this interaction and have no immediate expression in the language. Furthermore, the usage of PACKAGING is not restricted to information structural effects and the system plays a crucial role in discourse structuring and content management in Burmese.
Analysis of stand-alone nominalised sentences along the lines of a speaker’s subjective channel of communication suggests the resemblance with the function of similar phenomena in many other Tibeto-Burman languages. It proposes PACKAGING motivations for this function and shows how this can be mobilised for information structure-related interpretations.
Hence, the study rejects the view of a direct expression of information structural categories by linguistic means. Instead, similarly to many other linguistic categories, it proposes an indirect interpretive link between a pragmatically-semantically underspecified grammatical system and the derived interpretation.

This study examines two different floating L tones (L) in Kikuyu (Bantu E51): A lexical L and a phrasal L which appears in assertive utterances. Based on previous studies, this paper proposes a unified analysis of the domain of the two floating L tones within the syntax-phonology interface. The main claim is that they attest different strategies to trigger downstep at the right edge of a phonological phrase while no downstep is triggered internally of this domain. New data and different configurations with nominal modifying adjectives is discussed with the outcome that adjectives which follow other modifiers phrase alone. This is conform with the proposed analysis when taking the syntax of adjectives in Kikuyu into consideration.

El domingo 20 de noviembre de 2011 señalaría un antes y un después en
la dirección política de España por aquel entonces aún impredecible. Un
penúltimo domingo de otoño marcó la elección del Partido Popular como la
última que se disputarían Partido Popular y Partido Socialista Obrero Español bajo la denominación de ‘bipartidismo’ o como ya entonces muchos
acuñaban ‘PPSOE’.
Quizá no fuera esa, sino el 25 de mayo de 2014, con motivo de las elecciones al Parlamento Europeo la fecha en la que el sistema bipartidista, vigente desde 1982, se resquebrajó.
En tal contexto, nuevos conjuntos políticos irrumpen en escena, bajo el
pretexto de buscar “el empoderamiento de la gente para que no robasen la
democracia” (Iglesias, 2014). Partidos emergentes como Ciudadanos y sus lí-
deres, pero más concretamente Podemos, es decir, Pablo Iglesias —objeto de
este estudio—, son los encargados de capitanear el ‘cambio’ a través del arma
más importante: una nueva retórica.

Muchas variedades del mixteco, una lengua otomangue hablada en el sur de México, han sido descritas como lenguas con tres tonos: Bajo, Medio y Alto. En esta tesis presento evidencia basada en investigación original sobre los sustantivos simples alienables para demostrar que solo dos tonos léxicos son necesarios para describir las raíces nominales del mixteco de Acatlán, /A/ (que corresponde al tono Medio tradicional) y /B/. Algunos de los tonos altos son tonos flotantes. Esencialmente, el tono extra A (que corresponde al A tradicional) solo ocurre en ambientes derivados en los que interactúan los tonos de dos o más morfemas. En la mayoría del análisis uso A y B para representar a los dos tonos, pero en la última sección presento evidencia de que los tonos bajos no están especificados en la forma subyacente. El mixteco de Acatlán (hablado sobre todo en el estado de Puebla, México) ha atraído algo de atención debido a la propuesta en E. Pike y Wistrand (1974) de que un proceso tonal poco común tipológicamente conocido como « ascenso iterativo » (iterative upstep en inglés) existe en esta variante, cuyas implicaciones teóricas ponen en duda la universalidad del principio del contorno obligatorio (Snider 1988, Snider 1999 y Aronovich 1994). Aunque el ascenso tonal no es el objeto de estudio de esta tesis, este análisis proveerá una base para explorar el ascenso tonal en el futuro, sobre todo la descripción de los efectos ascendentes de los tonos altos flotantes. Propongo que únicamente se requieren seis patrones tonales para representar las formas subyacentes de todas las raíces nominales (/A/, /B/, /BA/, /AB/, /AB(A)/ y /B(A)/). También propongo que tres procesos tonales (la propagación del tono alto, la elevación del tono alto y la depresión del tono alto) y una condición del principio del contorno obligatorio (la condición de las dos casillas, la cual es un caso del principio del contorno obligatorio que describo en esta tesis) generan las formas fonéticas de estos sustantivos.

The paper discusses the accent of kako ‘how’, tako ‘thus’, ovako ‘this way’, onako ‘that way’ and some other related words (like nikako ‘no way’, nekako ‘somehow’) primarily in Štokavian and Čakavian from a dialectological (including standard-dialect sources) and historical perspective (going back to Common Slavic). The alternation kȁko ‘how’ — kàko ̮ je < kakȍ ̮ je ‘how is’ is discussed in some detail.

This dissertation provides a comprehensive description of the tonal and intona- tional phonology of Lhasa Tibetan (LT) in the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. It is based on recorded data elicited from members of the Tibetan-Canadian community in Ottawa and Toronto.
The first two chapters of the dissertation contain background information about LT, a summary of previous research on LT tones and intonation, and an overview of the theoretical framework and conceptual tools used in the rest of the dissertation.
The third chapter deals with word tonology. I establish that the prosodic structure of LT brings evidence for four main constituents at or below the word level: a) the mora encodes vowel length contrasts, b) the syllable is the tone-bearing unit (TBU), c) the prosodic word, which is maximally binary, delimits the application of most tonal processes, and d) the prosodic word group, which matches grammatical words, is the domain of downstep. This prosodic structure provides evidence against the universality of the Prosodic Hierarchy (Selkirk, 2002; Nespor and Vogel, 2007) in that it has no phonological phrase, but has two word-level constituents. I then argue that LT has three lexical tones (H, LH, and L) – L being limited to some suffixes – and propose that these lexical tones are subject to tone rules applying within the prosodic word and the prosodic word group. These tone rules are similar to those proposed by Duanmu (1992), but have been improved to accurately predict the tone patterns of long polysyllabic words. Based on phonetic evidence, I also come to the conclusion that LT no longer has stress, and that the stress pattern found in other Bodic varieties has been reinterpreted as a part of the tonal system.
The fourth chapter analyses phrasal prosody. I argue that LT forms intona- tional phrases around clauses and marks them with  nal lengthening, pitch reset, and a limited set of boundary tones (H% and L%). Although communicative functions and information structure are mostly realized by means of  final particles and morphosyntactic devices in LT, I show that boundary tones, focal tones, and deac- centing interact with word tones to form complex melodic patterns.
In the  fifth chapter, I present a phonologically-based F0 synthesis model to verify the adequacy of the proposed Autosegmental-Metrical model of LT. This F0 synthesis model consists of three main components: a) the tonal targets defined in previous chapters, b) an F0 interpolation component based on the PENTA model (Xu, 2004), and c) an evaluation component allowing a comparison of the F0 contours of real LT utterances with resynthesized F0 contours of the same utterances. The F0 synthesis model is able to generate F0 contours that approximate the F0 contours of real LT recordings, suggesting that the proposed phonological model adequately captures the overall tonal and intonational phonology of LT.

In this paper, I provide an overview of tone encoding grammatical meanings, a phenomenon which to date has been insufficiently studied in depth by typologists, nor theoretical morphologists. A starting point for the present discussion is the newly published volume “Tone and inflection” (Palancar, Léonard eds. 2016), which contains a collection of papers focusing on inflectional tone in various languages, but mainly Oto-Manguean. I discuss basic formal and semantic properties of tone in grammar illustrating my claims with examples from the “Tone and inflection” volume as well as with cases from various African languages. I suggest and justify several implicational hypotheses covering typological patterning of grammatical tones; these proposed generalizations should be tested in a balanced survey in the future.

This chapter provides an account of the intonation patterns in Akan (Kwa, Niger-Congo). Tonal processes such as downstep, tonal spreading and tonal replacement influence the surface tone pattern of a sentence. In general, any Akan utterance independent of sentence type shows a characteristic downtrend in pitch. This chapter proposes that Akan employs a simple post-lexical tonal grammar that accounts for the shapes of an intonation contour. The unmarked post-lexical structure is found in simple declaratives. The downward trend of an intonation contour is shaped by local tonal interactions (downstep), and sentence-final tonal neutralization. In polar questions, an ι-phrase-final low boundary tone (L%) accounts for the intensity increase and lengthening of the final vowel compared to a declarative. Complex declaratives and left-dislocations show a partial pitch reset at the left edge of an embedded ι-phrase. Underlying lexical tones are not affected by intonation with the exception of sentence-final H-tones.

Bantu languages commonly signal tense, aspect, mood, polarity, and clause-type distinctions with tonal as well as segmental cues. The inflectional tonal melodies on verbs may be viewed as underlyingly floating H tones (henceforth ‘melodic Hs’) contributed by the morpho-syntax that are assigned by rule to different positions within the verb. Along with a small set of construction specific tonal adjustment rules, the number and position of melodic Hs distinguish one tonal melody from another.

The present dissertation makes two contributions to the study of the special role that tone plays in Bantu verbal morpho-syntax. First, it contributes extensive novel documentation of the verbal tone system of Idakho: a variety of the Luhya cluster of Bantu languages spoken near Lake Victoria in western Kenya and eastern Uganda. Second, I show how aspects of the Idakho system and that of other Luhya varieties like it have contributed to the development of rich diversity within the verbal tone systems of Luhya.

Part I comprises the descriptive component of the dissertation and emphasizes the impact of several factors known to influence verb tone in Bantu. Because many language consultants contributed to the project, the dissertation makes note of variation within and across speakers of Idakho. In Part II, I demonstrate the role that a preference for prosodically well-cued morphological boundaries has played in two striking tonal developments within the Luhya macrolanguage: the loss of a lexical tonal contrast reconstructed to Proto-Bantu and the introduction of tonal melodies in constructions for which there is no historical precedence for tonal inflection.

This paper provides a systematic account of the emergence of contour tone, based on a ‘syllable-tone-register’ model and a large body of new firsthand acoustic tonal data. The emergence of tone is a process of pitch upgrading from an accompanying feature of phonation types to a distinctive feature. It involves three linguistic prerequisites, which bring about three processes: (L1) various phonation types, clear voice, breathy voice, falsetto, etc., which intrinsically induce pitch differences. (L2) Mono-syllabic (with great sonorous power) morpheme structure that enhance the pitch differences. (L3) Phonologicalization, which conceptualizes the enhanced pitch differences to a phonological category, tone. Furthermore, this paper proposes two ecological preconditions behind the linguistic prerequisites: (N1) Humid climates, which tend to induce a breathy voice. (N2) Small body-size, which tends to induce falsetto and creaky voice. A flowchart is designed to show how these prerequisites lead to different types of the world’s languages and finally output contour tone.

The Peranakans – descendants of 18th/19th-century southern Chinese seafaring traders in Malaya and local women, a privileged minority group in the Straits Settlements with pro-British alignments and access to English education – are well placed as a locus for contact dynamics in a diverse, multilingual context, their linguistic repertoire comprising Baba Malay (BM), (Peranakan) English (PerE), and Chinese languages. This paper suggests that recognising the role of the Peranakans’ positioning and multilingual repertoire is instructive in appreciating language contact in Singapore, in particular the evolution of Singapore English (SgE). This confluence of factors – the Peranakans being dominant, multilingual, early English-adopting intermediaries – reinforces the argument for BM influence via PerE on the emergent SgE, demonstrating the significance of a founder population’s features as persistent and influential in a multilingual ecology. The paper concludes by highlighting the Peranakans’ evolution and continuing significance as a multicultural community in the 21st century.

Previous research has proposed a direct path from consonantal effects on F0 to the development of a rising tone value. However, findings from tone change studies in Asian languages suggest an additional pathway: a high tone (i.e., with a tonal target in the upper pitch range) may evolve into a rising tone, without consonantal conditioning. This study examines tone change pathways to rising in the Ngwi (Loloish) languages. Among the 11 Ngwi language clusters examined, a new rising tone value has unambiguously developed from an historically high tone in 9 of them. In several clusters, prevocalic consonants conditioned a tone split, but in other clusters, consonantal conditioning does not appear to have played a role. The findings suggest that a high tonal target is itself a condition favorable to the development of a rising tone value, as reaching a high tonal target in connected speech frequently entails a rising contour.

Abstract

This study comparatively examines the tonal structures of Akuapem Twi and Asante Twi. It precisely focuses on examining syntactic structures with similar tonal structures as well as those with different tonal structures in both dialects from an acoustic perspective. Subsidiary to the acoustic evidence, a further autosegmental formalization of the syntactic structures with different tonal structures are analyzed to demonstrate the phonological and tonal rules triggering the differences. The mean of the pitch values of three (3) Akuapem Male Speakers and three (3) Akuapem Female speakers are compared with the Asante mean values identified in pronouncing the same syntactic structures tokens. The age range of speakers recorded is 20-60 years. Graphs showing the PRAAT pitch values show the syntactic structures with similar as well as different tonal structures in both dialects. The paper concludes with the proposal that as a result of some tonal and phonological rules, syntactic structures such as pronominals and HḶH nouns, HL nouns, imperative verbs and a CV pronominal objects as well as pronominals and negative verbs with a CV post-position all have different tonal structures in both dialects.

Suprasegmental contrasts of tone and register are commonplace phonological phenomena among the languages of Mainland Southeast Asia and its periphery (MSEA) (Matisoff 1990, 2001). Insofar as we have come to understand the origins and evolution of such contrasts, two theories predominate: tonogenesis (Haudricourt 1954) and registrogenesis (Huffman 1976). In their classical forms, tonogenesis and registrogenesis are well suited for modeling the development of tone and register in the best known, most studied languages of MSEA, but there is much additional complexity that they fail to capture. This is especially true for languages of Austroasiatic stock, which in many cases have developed tone and register in ways that must be considered ‘unorthodox’ with respect to the received models (Ferlus 1979, 2004, 2011; Diffloth 1982a, 1982b; Svantesson 1989; Gehrmann 2015; Sidwell 2015, 2019).

The goal of this thesis is to present a possible way forward towards a unified conceptual framework for tone and register evolution in the languages of MSEA: desegmentalization. Expanding on Dockum’s (2019) concept of desegmental phonology, desegmentalization is the process by which one or more segmental properties (onset phonation, vowel height, vowel length or coda phonation) condition changes in the distribution of a language’s suprasegmental contrasts. A general survey of the Austroasiatic language family is presented, in which documented examples of desegmentalization are presented and discussed. Austroasiatic constitutes a useful laboratory for such a survey, because the identification of the segmental origins of suprasegmental contrasts in Austroasiatic languages is relatively straightforward in comparison to the other language families of MSEA. Based on this survey of desegmentalization processes in Austroasiatic, ten discrete desegmentalization models are proposed. The output typologies for the suprasegmental contrasts produced by each model are compared and implications for a general model of tonogenesis and registrogenesis are explored.

This thesis offers (1) a digestible introduction for the non-specialist to the historical development of suprasegmental contrast in MSEA, (2) a resynthesis of current tonogenetic theory which integrates classical tonogenesis, classical registrogenesis and various other, lesser-known evolutionary pathways under the larger umbrella of desegmentalization and (3) a comprehensive overview of tone and register origins in the Austroasiatic family.

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This article presents a phonological sketch of Duoxu, a little-known and virtually undescribed Tibeto-Burman language, spoken in Sichuan Province, China. The presented data, collected with a semi-speaker, are compared to those in an earlier description of Duoxu by Huáng and Yǐn (2012), collected with one of the last fluent speakers. All illustrative examples in the paper are accompanied by audio files to encourage further research and analysis of Duoxu, and to contribute to its preservation.

"This dissertation explores the phonological representation and the phonetic realization of prosodic prominence in Persian. It comprises two related parts: the first part addresses prosodic phrasing in Persian sentences, while the second part deals with phonetic correlates of prosodic prominence by reporting conducted production and perception experiments. The phonological part is carried out within the framework of Prosodic Phonology, and aims at determining the prosodic structure of Persian from foot level, up to utterance level. By adopting Optimality Theory, it tries to explain how morphosyntax-phonology interface constraints together with prosodic markedness constraints form the prosodic structure of the language. It begins with foot level and suggests that in languages like Persian which have one non-iterative weight-insensitive edgemost stress per word, a single foot which is edge-aligned with the minimal Phonological Word best explains the prosodic pattern at word level. This part also focuses on prosodic differences between lexical words and weak function words (clitics) and shows that any attempt to describe the prosodic structure of Persian without addressing this crucial difference, will not be able to provide explanation for a wide range of phenomena. This study suggests that proclitics and enclitics behave asymmetrically in Persian: enclitics prosodize as affixal clitics, while proclitics are free clitics. Next, it addresses the problem of weak function words which are not a part of their preceding or following XPs, and demonstrates how the phonological well-formedness constraints determine the direction of cliticization in these XP-external function words. It also deals with the issue of clitic clusters in Persian which was not explored in the previous works. Another contribution of this study is reclassification of so-called exceptionally initial-stressed words.
This dissertation also deals with the longstanding problem of Ezafe constructions and by reviewing previous proposals on the prosodic structure of these constructions, based on phonological evidence and phonetic observations suggests that each lexical word in an Ezafe construction maps onto a Phonological Phrase, and the Ezafe morpheme phrases with its preceding material to satisfy the phonological well-formedness constraint ONSET. The prosodic structure of XP-external clitics such as the Ezafe morpheme is explained by adopting a syntax-prosody interface constraint namely MAP-XP, that bans two sister XPs inside a single Phonological Phrase. This study proposes a ranking of OT constraints by which the prosodic structure of Ezafe constructions and other syntactic phrases such as DPs and VPs can be predicted and explained uniformly. It also proposes that the interaction between morphosyntax-phonology interface constraints and prosodic markedness constraints determine prosodic constituents of all levels and their heads, and other constraints require the heads of phonological phrases to be associated with audible accents. The rightmost Phonological Phrase in an Intonational Phrase is the head. This head associates with an accent which is perceived more prominently than the other accents. One further issue explored here is the fact that in lexicalized Ezafe constructions and also in the ones containing given/old information, some words may appear without audible accent.
The phonetic difference between final and non-final accents is the subject of the second half of this dissertation. Previous research on Persian has shown that the main acoustic correlate of prosodic prominence is f0. This study reports production and perception experiment results conducted in order to answer the question whether final (nuclear) accents are perceived more prominently than the other ones only because they are not followed by any other accent, or because they are phonetically different from the non-final (pre-nuclear) accents. The results of production experiments reveal that nuclear accented syllables have a lower f0 range, but a longer duration in comparison with pre-nuclear accented ones. Other parameters such as overall intensity, spectral tilt and vowel quality do not differ significantly in the two types of accents. Perception experiments reveal that native listeners can indeed distinguish the two types of accents without having access to the portion of the utterance that follows the final accent. This proves that the two types of accents are phonetically different. Perception tests also show that the difference between the shapes of f0 curves in the two types of accents is the main acoustic parameter that helps the listeners distinguish them from each other. In pre-nuclear accented words, the f0 peak is at the right edge of the metrically strong syllable, and the curve has a rising slope at this point. In these syllables, the peak may even occur on the initial syllable of the following word. However, in the syllables associated with nuclear accents, the f0 peak is located inside the syllable, and the curve has a falling slope at the right edge of the syllable.
If the f0 at the right edge of a nuclear accented syllable is manipulated and raised so that the f0 peak is moved to the right edge, the native listeners will perceive the word containing this syllable as a pre-nuclear accented word. This study also shows that duration alone cannot cue the difference between the two types of accents. However, when accompanied by f0 changes, it can help the listeners distinguish the two accents more easily and more efficiently.
Downloadable at: http://roa.rutgers.edu/content/article/files/1314_hosseini_1.pdf
"

Although the Ancients placed great emphasis on delivery, modern rhetorical scholars often overlook the oral dimensions of speech. Speech is powerful because of its ability to elicit a somatic response. Scholars in other disciplines are examining how speech affects the body, but contemporary rhetorical scholarship often overlooks their findings. This essay reviews scholarship both inside and outside of communication studies that demonstrates the interplay between rhetoric and orality, paying particular attention to how scientific scholarship can inform our conception of ethos and pathos. By drawing together scientific and rhetorical scholarship, scholars in all disciplines can gain a greater understanding of how speech affects the mind, body, and soul.

Guro, a richly tonal language of Côte d’Ivoir, presents some challenges for the Match Theory (a recent development of the theories of Prosodic Hierarchy) which implies a strict correspondence between prosodic and morphosyntactic units starting from the lexical level. Guro exhibits a ‘featural’ foot, which is not based on metrical stress. However, this is only an emerging prosodic domain: the language is characterised by ongoing intensive ‘footisation’ and monosyllabification processes which constantly change the shapes of morphosyntactic units. The degree of footisation depends on the degree of idiomaticity of a particular morphosyntactic construction, along a continuum from morpheme combinations to free phrases, i.e. essentially on a semantic parameter.
There is also another prosodic domain relevant at the lexical level: the domain of morphonological tonal change. As shown by example of di- and trisyllabic nouns, the two prosodic domains tend to be aligned with each other and with the morphosyntactic word, but this is not a strict rule.

Lagwan is a Central Chadic Kotoko language, spoken in northern Cameroon and neighbouring areas of Chad and Nigeria. It has a rich consonantal system, with consonants belonging to four
major points of articulation: labial, coronal, dorsal and labialised dorsal. The evidence suggests that this latter series, while synchronically a phonological class in its own right, has its historical source in a
labialisation prosody. The sub-lexicon of loan words has a fifth class of palatal obstruents.

As in many Afro-asiatic languages, the rich consonantal skeleton is supplemented by a poverty of vowel-slots. Underlying vowels
principally have the quality |a|, while four other vowels have emerging phonological status, with a greater number of vowel contrasts observed word-finally. The front vowels are more productive than
their round counterparts; this apparent bias is balanced by the series of labialised obstruents in the consonant system. The poverty of underlying vowels is balanced by the insertion of ‘zero vowels’ to
preserve well-formed syllabification. The zero vowel is characterised by its absence in the underlying form, its early insertion and predictability in the lexical phonology and its ability to bear contrastive tone, this being
associated within the lexical phonology.

Lagwan is a tonal language, with two tones and the syllable as its TBU. Realisation of tone is in some cases lexically specified, and in others can be predicted based on syllable structure. Lagwan is unusual in allowing syllabic consonants (both liquids and obstruents) in word-initial position. These syllabic consonants invariably bear default low tone.

Abstract Since Kenstowicz et at's analysis of Moore (1988), a widespread view is that tone polarity does not exist; apparent polarity is actually dissimilation. This paper shows that an OCP-based dissimilation analysis cannot account for the full range of K: mni data, and presents a morpheme-specific POLAR constraint referring to the Noun Class 1 plural suffix. POLAR is satisfied in two or possibly three ways: the polar tone may be inserted, be already present in the input, or possibly spread from the definite suffix.

Our way to recite Latin and Greek texts lacks consistency. In order to improve the quality and authenticity we may look to the East, i.e. to the Brahmins, where there is an unbroken continuity of reciting ancient texts that has lasted for at least three thousand years. But things are not quite so simple...

In Mandarin phonology, the production and perception of tones and intonation of
Mandarin native speakers are widely studied. Nowadays, more and more learners around the world learn Mandarin Chinese as a second language or a foreign language. Therefore, the study of their perception and production of tones and intonation become essential, especially for intonation teaching and learning. Both tones and intonation are difficult for learners to acquire and master well; therefore, it will cause foreign accent of learners. This study aims to see the relationship between perception and production in Mandarin intonation of foreign language learners by discovering the possible factors affecting the that relationship, such as tones at the sentence-final position, tones in different sentence types, learners’ musical and language background, perceiving the sentence by different genders and tones and intonation in a given scenario. An experiment was conducted with 16 designed sentences and a questionnaire. 20 foreign language learners of Mandarin Chinese in the U.K. were asked to do the perception and production tasks. The results were quantified and analysed by SPSS software. The result of the analysis indicates that the interaction of tones and sentence types significantly affect the result of learners’ perception and production. The other indication is that the sentences produced with a female voice are easier for learners to produce correctly. The finding of this study provides support for some previous studies of possible factors, such as music and language backgrounds and learners’ motivations which would not affect the perception and production of learners.

This paper discusses a new 'Multi-Register and Four-Level' (RL) tonal model. Register is defined by phonation types. There are six major types of phonation, which define three Registers: H, M, and L. The RL model is an improvement over the traditional 'five-point' tonal scale. Its tenability depends on whether it can accommodate the three known five level tone systems. The most challenging case among the three is the Dong language of Gaoba, a variety of the Tai-Kadai family. A field investigation was conducted and the five Gaoba level tones were reexamined. It was found the highest level tone in Gaoba is produced with a falsetto voice. Gaoba Dong thus constitutes a piece of supportive, rather than counter, evidence for the RL model. Then we deal with several tonal systems with single-, double-, or triple-register(s). SUBJECT KEYWORDS Tone representation Phonation types Phonological registers Five level tones The five-point scale Gaoba Dong / ¨ § , and Qinqiang © . It is easy to identify falsetto by listening to singing, and even easier by listening to Rg H Rg M Rg L Voiceless Breathy Creaky Low High Mid Pitch Phonation Falsetto Register Fortis Modal

The aim of the article is to present basic (albeit not exhaustive) data on the tonal accent in the modern Western South Slavic languages in synchronic and diachronic perspective, with the main focus on Štokavian/Čakavian/Kajkavian and New Štokavian in particular. Apart from that, the author briefly reviews relevant present-day scientific works and touches upon some typical problems, especially those causing confusion, puzzlement and contradictions in research today.

The Luyia languages of western Kenya and eastern Uganda have some of the most complicated systems of tonal morphology among Bantu languages. Luyia varieties commonly have 7-8 or more inflectional tonal patterns in verbs, and as many as 12 are reported in one Marachi dialect, possibly marking the peak complexity within Bantu.

Although segmental and lexical differences among Luyia varieties tend to be relatively minor, there is considerable diversity among Luyia verbal tonal systems. Eastern varieties like Idakho and Tachoni have historically conservative systems with a contrast between /H/ and /Ø/ verb roots. In these languages, some tenses are inflected with a ‘melodic H’ that links to a position at one of the edges of the stem, e.g. second mora, final vowel. Southwestern Luyia varieties like Khayo and Saamia have developed into so-called ‘predictable’ systems in which there are no lexical contrasts in verb roots, and all tenses are inflected with a melodic tone. Yet other Luyia varieties have hybrid properties, with a lexical contrast between two tonal types of roots, and a melodic tonal inflection in all verb forms. Some of these systems, e.g. Nyole and Nyala East, appear to have inverted root H tones as synchronically /L/, while others, e.g. Bukusu and Wanga, are more ambiguous as to whether historically *H verb roots are synchronically /H/ or /L/.

Throughout Bantu, nominal tone is less well studied than verbal tone, due to the fact that nouns are morphologically simpler and tend not to have inflectional alternations. However, emerging research suggests that at least some Luyia noun tone systems rival their verbal tone systems in complexity. For instance, eight distinct lexical tonal patterns are attested in disyllabic noun stems in the central Luyia variety Wanga—a historical doubling of the four patterns reconstructed for Proto-Bantu (LL, HH, LH, HL). Two patterns surface all L in phrase-final position: toneless omu-limi ‘farmer’ vs. L-final axasì ‘maternal cousin’. These two patterns distinguish themselves phrase-medially. Three other tone patterns are characterized by a single H that occupies different positions: eʃi-láaro ‘shoe’ vs. omu-laáme ‘heir’ vs. i-koofyá ‘hat’. Three further patterns are characterized by two Hs, again differing in the positions of the Hs: eʃi-muúꜜná ‘squirrel’ vs. eʃíꜜ-túúyu ‘rabbit’ vs. liíꜜ-téété ‘grasshopper’.
As seems to be the norm in Luyia, there is also significant internal diversity in the lexical tonal patterns of nouns.

This talk aims to begin the challenging task of explaining the diversification and complexification of modern Luyia tone systems.

Presentation Goals (i) Trace the course of a diachronic re-analysis of the lexical contrast between */H/ and */Ø/ verbs in Proto-Bantu (Stevick 1969) within languages of the Luhya (a.k.a. Luyia) cluster spoken in Western Kenya and (ii) identify some of the factors that catalyzed such re-analyses.

2010. Working Papers in Linguistics, UBC, Vancouver, Canada, Vol. 25, pp. 41-53

A large amount of evidence in the literature has established the mora as the prosodic tone-bearing unit (Hyman 1985, Pulleyblank 1994, Jiang-King 1999, among others). Moreover, there are languages in which the tone-bearing unit is not just any mora, but sonorant moras only (Yip 2002: 73; see Zec 1988 and Steriade 1991). Quiaviní Zapotec (Otomanguean) behaves in this way as vowels and coda sonorants bear tone. However, based on the fortis/lenis distinction, this study claims for a split between fortis and lenis sonorants, in that only the former are tone-bearing. Phonological and phonetic evidence support this proposal.

This paper examines the role that a change in phonation and a slight contour in fundamental frequency (F0) have for the perception of the three phonologically level tones in the Fuzhou variety of Chinese. An experiment was devised whereby synthetic tokens with modified F0 heights were included among natural tokens and presented to native listeners who were asked to identify specific words from a given set when they heard them. The results of the experiment show that both phonation and slight F0 rise/fall are significant factors for the correct identification of the ‘level’ tones in Fuzhou. This paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the significance of these so-called ‘secondary cues’ for phonology.

In this paper, I propose a mathematical method for evaluating Chinese vocal music in terms of the degree of tonal congruence, based upon three categories of tonal accommodation principles, i.e. tonal contour resemblance, register distinction and ad hoc grace notes. Based on previous studies, I first give a much-needed detailed description of how tone sandhi and the neutral tone are accommodated in Chinese vocal music, but more importantly I also introduce tonal register distinction and ad hoc grace notes as new principles to evaluate tonal accommodation. Then an index is created to take all these principles into consideration, which enables the comparison of different songs in terms of their degrees of tonal congruence. This index is not only theoretically innovative but also useful when it comes to selection of Chinese vocal music for teaching purposes in CFL classes.