University of california
Outline of the Dissertation
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Outline of the DissertationIn Chapter 2, I give an overview of the phonetics of contour tones, the main objective of which is to establish the importance of the sonorous portion of the rime in the production and perception of contour tones. Informed with the knowledge of contour tone phonetics, Chapter 3 defines the Tonal Complexity Scale, identifies phonological factors that may influence the duration and sonority of the rime, and most importantly, lays out specific empirical predictions of the most phonetically-informed approach to contour tone distribution—the direct approach, and compares it with the predictions of the other approaches. Chapter 3 documents the typological survey on the positional prominence effect of contour tones. The survey found that four properties of a syllable make it more privileged for contour-bearing: having a phonemic long vowel or a sonorant coda, being stressed, being in the final position of a prosodic domain, and belonging to a short word. The contour-bearing privilege is expressed through implicational hierarchies, such as ‘if syllable x can carry contour tones, then syllable y can carry contour tones with equal or greater complexity,’ which establishes syllable y as a more privileged contour bearer. All these factors are among the factors that lengthen the sonorous rime duration identified in Chapter 3, and more than three levels of distinction in contour tone bearing ability are sometimes needed. These findings support the direct approach to contour tone licensing, and provide evidence that positional prominence is contrast-specific. Explanations are also provided for why certain factors that influence duration and sonority as identified in Chapter 3 do not affect the behavior of contour tone licensing. Chapter 5 documents the series of phonetic studies that can also differentiate the three approaches to contour tone licensing. The languages under study are those in which two different factors influencing sonorous rime duration directly conflict. The results again support the direct approach, which predicts that the position which induces the greatest phonetic advantage for contour tone realization is the best licensor for contour tones. The moraic approach and the traditional faithfulness approach, given that they do not refer to phonetic facts of duration and sonority in the language in question, predicts unattested patterns. This is also evidence for the relevance of language-specific phonetics for positional prominence. In Chapter 6, I summarize the arguments against the moraic approach to contour tone distribution. I also discuss the possibility of using tonal melody to capture the advantages of prosodic-final syllables and syllables in shorter words for contour-bearing. The question originates from the observation that Align constraints envisioned by McCarthy and Prince (1993) may generate some of these effects without having to refer to the durational advantages of these syllables directly in the analysis. I discuss two types of tonal association—lexical association and tonal melody mapping—and show that the alignment approach is inadequate for either type of languages. In Chapter 7, I propose a phonetically-driven Optimality-theoretic approach to the positional prominence phenomena regarding contour tones. I propose three families of constraints: markedness constraints against certain contour tones on certain syllable types, markedness constraints against extra duration on the syllable, and faithfulness constraints on tonal realization. The constraints in each family are intrinsically ranked according to scales of phonetic difficulties or the number of categories away from the canonical realization. Interleaving these three families of constraints, we predict that in contexts with shorter duration, one of three things may occur: the contour is flattened; the syllable is lengthened; or both contour-flattening and syllable-lengthening are employed. These predictions match the contour distribution patterns attested in the survey. Chapter 8 provide analyses for the contour tone distribution in five representative languages—Pingyao Chinese, Xhosa, Mitla Zapotec, Gã, and Hausa—in the proposed theoretical apparatus. Chapter 9 summarizes the dissertation and outlines its contribution to our understanding of phonological patterning.
The Phonetics of Contour TonesThe question of concern in this chapter is ‘what are the phonetic properties that determinate a syllable’s ability to bear contour tone?’ I show that the most crucial phonetic parameters for contour tone bearing are the duration and sonority of the rime portion of the syllable. I show this in three steps: the importance of sonority, the importance of duration, and the irrelevance of syllable onsets. The Importance of Sonority in Contour Tone BearingThe main perceptual correlate of tone is the fundamental frequency (f0). Therefore the perception of tone crucially depends on the perception of f0. Given that the spectral region containing the second, third and fourth harmonics is crucial in the perception of fundamental frequencies in the range of speech sounds, as shown by Plomp (1967) and Ritsma (1967), we infer that tonal perception crucially depends on the presence of second to fourth harmonics (see also House 1990 and Moore 1995 for review of psychoacoustic literature). Since we also know that sonorous segments possess richer harmonic structures than obstruents—the crucial second to fourth harmonics are usually present in sonorants, but not in obstruents—we are led to conclude that sonorants are better tone bearers than obstruents. Moreover, vowels typically have greater energy, and thus stronger acoustic manifestation of harmonics, in the high-frequency region than sonorant consonants. Therefore they are better tone bearers than sonorant consonants. But given that the crucial harmonics for tonal perception are still present in sonorant consonants, we expect this distinction to be less effective than the one between sonorants and obstruents. The above points are clearly illustrated in the narrow-band spectrogram in (0) (adapted from Gordon 1998). The vowel [a] has a rich harmonic structure across the frequency range; the sonorant nasal [m] has a clear f0 and the first, second, and third harmonics; the obstruent [z], on the other hand, does not have a clear harmonic structure, even though its f0 is present. (0) Harmonics of vowel, sonorant consonant, and obstruent consonant: 
The tone bearing abilities of vowels, sonorant consonants, and obstruent consonants are summarized in (0). (0) Tone bearing abilities of vowels, sonorant consonants, and obstruent consonants:
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