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Local Conclusion

In this chapter, I have provided an analysis for one representative language for each of the five major patterns predicted by the factorial typology discussed in Chapter 7. In summary, the restriction of contour tones to syllables with greater C_CONTOUR values (such as in Pingyao Chinese and Xhosa) is captured by the high-ranking of the relevant *Contour-C_CONTOUR constraints and *Dur constraints. Allowing contours on syllables with smaller original C_CONTOUR values upon rime lengthening (such as in Mitla Zapotec and Gã) is captured by the high-ranking of *Contour-C_CONTOUR constraints and Pres(T) constraints. And finally, allowing contours on syllables with smaller original C_CONTOUR values upon both partial contour flattening and rime lengthening (such as in Hausa) is captured by interleaving the *Contour-C_CONTOUR constraints with *Dur and Pres(T) constraints.

9. Conclusion

This dissertation addressed the following two general questions: (a) Are positional prominence effects contrast-specific? (b) For a specific phonological contrast, is its positional prominence behavior tuned to language-specific phonetic patterns?

The phonological entity that I used in this dissertation to address these two questions is contour tones. Contour tones are particularly suitable for this task for the following two reasons.

First, according to the phonetic properties of contour tones, we know clearly that the duration of the sonorous portion of the rime is the most crucial factor for the production and perception of contour tones. This provides us with a testing ground for the contrast specificity of positional prominence, because we can then compare the distribution of contour tones with the distribution of some other phonological features whose production and perception do not crucially rely on the abundance of sonorous rime duration—if contour tones are found to occur more freely in positions with longer sonorous rime duration, while the abundance of this duration is not a necessary condition for the occurrence of the phonological features in comparison, it can be taken as strong evidence for the contrast specificity of positional prominence; otherwise positional prominence is likely to be general-purpose, i.e., feature-blind.

Second, there exist multiple phonological factors that affect the duration of the sonorous portion of the rime, and the effect of these factors can be of different magnitudes. Crucially, the difference in magnitude among these phonological factors can be language-specific. This then provides us with an opportunity to address the question whether differences in the magnitude of phonetic advantage result in differences in phonological patterning regarding positional prominence, since if in the face of the same phonological factors that affect sonorous rime duration, the distribution of contour tones is also language-specific, and in particular language-specific according to the magnitude of the durational advantage induced by these factors, we will have a strong argument for the relevance of such phonetic details in positional prominence, and possibly phonological patterning in general. Otherwise we must conclude that the magnitude of phonetic advantage induced by the prominent position is not relevant to the phonological patterning of positional prominence.

In a typological survey of 187 languages, I found that the distribution of contour tones in a language correlates closely with the duration of the sonorous portion of the rime of different syllable types. Syllable types which have longer sonorous duration of the rime, e.g., long-vowelled, sonorant-closed, stressed, final in a prosodic domain, and being in a shorter word, are more likely to carry contour tones. This, I argue, constitutes strong support for the contrast specificity of positional prominence, since we know that final position is not a prominent position for many other phonological contrasts that do not require the presence of abundant duration, e.g., [±cor] in consonants, [±high] in vowels; and initial position, which is a prominent position for many other phonological contrasts, does not much benefit contour tones, precisely because it does not provide any extra duration.

In phonetic studies of languages with the same multiple factors that induce rime lengthening, I found that contour tones always favor the factor with the greatest lengthening, even though different languages have different factors that induce the greatest lengthening. This, I argue, is evidence for the relevance of phonetic details such as the non-contrastive durational properties of different syllable types in different positions in phonological patterning.

To provide a formal account for the effects of duration and sonority on the distribution of contour tones, I propose theoretical apparatus couched in Optimality Theory. Given the wide range of cross-linguistic variations on the phonetic realization of contour tones on different types of syllables and the relevance of detailed durational properties in the distribution of contour tones shown by the phonetic studies, the theoretical apparatus necessarily encodes many phonetic details. But it is shown that the apparatus only predicts general patterns that observe the implicational hierarchies established in the contour-tone survey. It is also shown that the proposed analysis can account for both the ‘phonological’ effect such as the neutralization of tone and length and the ‘phonetic’, albeit language-specific, effect of partial contour reduction and rime lengthening.