When Small Body marries Humid Climate: The birth of ... tone

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015

We summarize a number of findings in laryngology demonstrating that perturbations of phonation, including increased jitter and shimmer, are associated with desiccated ambient air. We predict that, given the relative imprecision of vocal fold vibration in desiccated versus humid contexts, arid and cold ecologies should be less amenable, when contrasted to warm and humid ecologies, to the development of languages with phonemic tone, especially complex tone. This prediction is supported by data from two large independently coded databases representing 3,700+ languages. Languages with complex tonality have generally not developed in very cold or otherwise desiccated climates, in accordance with the physiologically based predictions. The predicted global geographic-linguistic association is shown to operate within continents, within major language families, and across language isolates. Our results offer evidence that human sound systems are influenced by environmental factors.

Lingua, 2009

1974

This annotated bibliography, which has been entered into the SOLAR Bibliography File, focuses on the phonetics and phonology of tone, including studies on the physiology of phonation and pitch control, pitch perception, inherent pitch of vowels, the interaction of tone with musical melody in tone languages, and other related issues. An attempt has been made to cover all the major contributions to such subjects as the phonological epresentation of tone, the nature of downdrift, the interaction of pitch and consonant types, and to include many phonological descriptions of tone or°p itch accent° systems. The main entries, totaling 550, are listed in alphabetical sequence by author. In addition to the bibliographic citation, a list of keywords is provided for each entry. Abstracts are given for virtually all entries. An index is provided from an alphabetical listing of all the keywords, the language names and families, and the geographical areas of languages referred to in the entries. (KM) BEST COPY AVAILABLE sicr Ji://lyrasve,.5ft-e7.T

2004

Tone and Intonation are two types of pitch variation, which are used by speakers of many languages in order to give shape to utterances. More specifically, tone encodes morphemes, and intonation gives utterances a further discoursal meaning that is independent of the meanings of the words themselves. In this comprehensive survey, Carlos Gussenhoven provides an up-to-date overview of research into tone and intonation, discussing why speakers vary their pitch, what pitch variations mean, and how they are integrated into our grammars. He also explains why intonation in part appears to be universally understood, while at other times it is language-specific and can lead to misunderstandings. The first eight chapters concern general topics: phonetic aspects of pitch modulation; typological notions (stress, accent, tone, and intonation); the distinction between phonetic implementation and phonological representation; the paralinguistic meaning of pitch variation; the phonology and phonetics of downtrends; developments from the Pierrehumbert-Beckman model; and tone and intonation in Optimality Theory. In chapters 9-15, the book's central arguments are illustrated with comprehensive phonological descriptions-partly in OT-of the tonal and intonational systems of six languages, including Japanese, French, and English.

Frontiers in Psychology

All languages employ consonants and vowels as discrete contrastive subcomponents of the basic timing units of words (syllables). These two classes of phonemes are used to differentiate between words, whose meanings can be categorically changed by switching even a single vowel or consonant, as in <pat> vs. <cat> or <pet>. They populate the lowest level of the phonological hierarchy, the segmental tier, and both classes are obligatory across spoken languages. But only some languages also make use of lexical tones, contrastive sub-syllabic fundamental frequency (pitch) variations referred to as tonemes (e.g., Jones, 1944), which for those languages comprise a third class of phonemic elements. Perceptual researchers often assume tones to be suprasegmental (e.g., So

International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of …, 2004

Prosodic typology has generally concentrated on those aspects of prosodic representation which are assumed to be represented in the lexicon. It is argued here that non-lexical representation at various levels, underlying phonological, surface phonological and phonetic, can also constitute a basis for prosodic typology. An example is given of a low-level comparison of English and French pitch patterns. A prosodic model integrating these different levels is presented which, it argued can provide a useful tool for the investigation of prosodic typology and for a more robust basis for establishing the more abstract levels including those of lexical representations.

Language and Linguistics Compass, 2016

2011

This thesis uses acoustic measurements as a basis for the phonological analysis of the interaction of tone with voicing and foot structure in Kera (a Chadic language). In both tone spreading and vowel harmony, the iambic foot acts as a domain for spreading. Further evidence for the foot comes from measurements of duration, intensity and vowel quality. Kera is unusual in combining a tone system with a partially independent metrical system based on iambs. In words containing more than one foot, the foot is the tone bearing unit (TBU), but in shorter words, the TBU is the syllable. In perception and production experiments, results show that Kera speakers, unlike English and French, use the fundamental frequency as the principle cue to &#39;Voicing&quot; contrast. Voice onset time (VOT) has only a minor role. Historically, tones probably developed from voicing through a process of tonogenesis, but synchronically, the feature voice is no longer contrastive and VOT is used in an enhancing...

2014

This thesis bridges accounts of tonogenesis to representations of contour tones in the dominant framework, autosegmental phonology. Accounts of tonogenesis reference phonetic features and structures that are unable to be represented in autosegmental phonology. As these features are required for the phonologization of contour tones, it is argued that they must also receive some representation in the synchrony. This is done under the Evolutionary Phonology framework of sound change. An attempt to reconcile the disparity between perceived phonetic features and synchronic structure is made by discussing the implications of the sequencing of targets within autosegmental contours. This innovation would better reflect the tonal systems of the world’s languages as well as other asymmetries in segmental phonology.

2007