Tone

One of the fundamental goals of phonological theory is to determine how, starting with a complete phonetic description of a language, we can establish a small number of discrete categories along the various dimensions in which speech sounds may vary (see PHONOLOGY and PHONETICS). These discrete categories along each phonetic dimension are the values assumed by DISTINCTIVE FEATURES, and in any given language they must be rich enough to distinguish utterances that differ with regard to their word choice or their grammatical information, but no richer; other phonetic detail is excluded from such a phonological description. Pitch is the name given to the frequency of pulsation of the vocal cords during speech; it describes a continuous variable, which can range from about 50 Hz, at the bottom of a man's range, to about 400 Hz, at the top of a woman's range. Tone refers to the small number of discrete categories necessary for analyzing pitch in a phonological fashion.

Tone is normally analyzed as a property not of individual segments (or sounds), but of syllables. From a descriptive point of view, the pitch of syllables may be either (roughly) constant throughout, or it may have a more complex, dynamic pitch -- typically rising or falling. In the first case, such syllables are phonologically assigned a single "level" tone; in the second, in almost all cases, the syllable is analyzed as being assigned a sequence of more than one level tone, and it is this sequence of distinct tones that gives rise to the "dynamic" or "contour" pitch: a sequence of low tone plus high tone gives rise to a rising pitch, and so on. The number of distinct tonal levels (corresponding to different levels of pitch) varies from language to language, but two, three, and four levels of tone are not at all uncommon, and a few languages with even more levels have been reported in the literature. In the neutral intonational pattern of English, a word with initial accent such as "wedding" has a high tone on the first syllable and a low tone on the second syllable, whereas a monosyllabic word such as "man" has a falling pitch, which is to say, the syllable is associated with a sequence of two tones, high and low, in that order.

The term tone language is traditionally used to refer to those languages that use differences in tone in order to distinguish between distinct lexical items (that is, distinct words; Pike 1948; Hyman 1978; McCawley 1978; Goldsmith 1994). Such systems may seem exotic from a European perspective, but tone languages are quite common around the world, including a large number of Asian languages (including notably the well-studied Sino-Tibetan languages; Yip 1995), most African languages (especially the well-studied Niger-Congo languages; Odden 1995), and many Mesoamerican languages, especially the Oto-Manguean languages. It is appropriate to bear in mind that in these languages, tone is just as often used to manifest grammatical categories as it is to mark lexical contrasts. For example, in many Bantu languages of Africa, the verb will consist of six or more syllables, composed of a polysyllabic stem with several prefixes. The first syllable of the stem is the lexical root, and its tone is a lexical (that is, idiosyncratic) property. The tones of the following syllables of the stem, however, will be determined by the tense of the sentence, and they are thus considered to express grammatical information.

Languages are often divided into three categories, from a prosodic point of view: tone languages, pitch-accent languages, and intonational languages, but the boundaries between these categories can be difficult to discern at times (see PROSODY AND INTONATION). Pitch-accent systems share in common with tone languages relatively strict principles determining the tone assigned to each syllable, and thus the pitch at which each syllable will be uttered, but rather than utilize tonal differences as such in the LEXICON, pitch-accent systems characteristically employ a single tonal melody (e.g., low-high-low, constant across the language), and assign it to an entire phonological word. However, such languages employ an assignment algorithm that recognizes that one syllable is prosodically special, the syllable that is called "accented." The accented syllable bears a special mark in the lexicon, and tone mapping will typically make that accented status be phonetically unique in some fashion, by making it the final high of the word, or the first high, or through some other means. The information that is thus transmitted by the pitch pattern is which syllable is accented, rather than what the tonal melody is. The location of the pitch accent will in some languages be predictable by simple rule, in others by complex rules involving the interaction of the morphemes involved, and in yet others be simply stipulated in the lexicon. Tokyo Japanese is a familiar example of a pitch-accent system. However, some systems exist (including other dialects of Japanese) that contain two distinct tonal patterns, and lexical items must be marked as to which tonal pattern is appropriate. Systems of this sort share functional characteristics with tone languages, and blur the boundary between tone languages and pitch-accent languages.

Intonational languages (a category that includes English) generally allow pragmatic factors to influence the tone and the pitch of an utterance to a greater degree than would a tone or pitch-accent language. Most intonational languages (French is an exception) share with pitch-accent systems the characteristic of marking exactly one syllable as accented, and using the location of that accented syllable in the algorithm that maps an intonational pattern to the phonological word. However, it is very difficult -- indeed, at this point, it seems impossible -- to draw a sharp boundary between those aspects of intonation that can be adequately handled with discrete linguistic categories and those that blend gradually into the noncategorical aspects of general communicative behavior. A consideration of the intonation of ironic, polite, or highly emotional speech quickly encounters this problem.

As these remarks suggest, one of the most important characteristics of tonal patterns in language is their considerable autonomy with respect to the other characteristics of spoken language, which are produced largely by the mouth and nose. This autonomy is manifested in several ways, including: (1) the numerical mismatch, or many-to-many relationship, found between tones and syllables; (2) the retention of a tone despite the synchronic or diachronic loss of a tone (so-called tonal stability); and (3) the existence of morphemes that consist solely of one or more tonal specifications (so-called floating tones). These observations are closely linked to the foundations of autosegmental phonology (Goldsmith 1990). In addition to the numerical mismatch between tones and syllables, tone languages often display a temporal mismatch between the tones and the syllables of a given morpheme. The consequence of this is that it is not at all uncommon to find in tone languages that a morpheme is underlyingly (or analytically) composed of both tones and syllables, and yet the tone(s) of the morpheme will be consistently realized on a different syllable, either earlier or later than the syllable(s) pertaining to that morpheme.

References

Goldsmith, J. (1990). Autosegmental and Metrical Phonology. Oxford: Blackwell.

Goldsmith, J. (1994). Tone languages. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Pergamon Press, pp. 4626-4628.

Hyman, L. (1978). Tone and/or accent. In D. J. Napoli, Ed., Elements of Tone, Stress, and Intonation. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 1-20.

McCawley, J. (1978). What is a tone language? In V. A. Fromkin, Ed., Tone: A Linguistic Survey. New York: Academic Press, pp. 113-131.

Odden, D. (1995). Tone: African languages. In J. Goldsmith, Ed., The Handbook of Phonological Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 444-475.

Pike, K. (1948). Tone Languages: A Technique for Determining the Number and Type of Pitch Contrasts in a Language, with Studies in Tonemic Substitution and Fusion. University of Michigan Publications in Linguistics, no. 4. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Yip, M. (1995). Tone in East Asian languages. In J. Goldsmith, Ed., The Handbook of Phonological Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 476-494.

Tone

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Further Readings