User:Aiyaaaaaaaaa/Tone sandhi

Lead section
Tone sandhi is a phonological change that occurs in tonal languages. It involves changes to the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes, based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes.

This change typically simplifies a bidirectional tone into a one-directional tone.

MAYBE DEFINE BIDIRECTIONAL / PROVIDE EXAMPLES? can we get rid of this??

Tone sandhi is a type of sandhi, which refers to fusional changes, and is derived from the Sanskrit word for "joining."

Strictly speaking, tone sandhi refers to changes in tone at the morpheme or word boundaries (Chen 2000), but linguists have since expanded the definition to include changes in lexical tone that occur in any context.

Common contexts include:

- specific sequences of tones (e.g. two Tone 3s next to each other; Mandarin Tone 3 sandhi)

- the position of the tone within the utterance or sentence (e.g. phrase-initial or phrase-final)

(Zhang 2014, Yip 2007).

In many contour-tone languages, one tone may affect the shape of an adjacent tone. The affected tone may become something new, a tone that only occurs in such situations, or it may be changed into a different existing tone. This is called tone sandhi. In Mandarin Chinese, for example, a dipping tone between two other tones is reduced to a simple low tone, which otherwise does not occur in Mandarin Chinese, whereas if two dipping tones occur in a row, the first becomes a rising tone, indistinguishable from other rising tones in the language. For example, the words 很 [xɤn˨˩˦] ('very') and 好 [xaʊ˨˩˦] ('good') produce the phrase 很好 [xɤn˧˥ xaʊ˨˩˦] ('very good'). The two transcriptions may be conflated with reversed tone letters as [xɤn˨˩˦꜔꜒xaʊ˨˩˦].

Languages with tone sandhi
Many North American and African tonal languages undergo "syntagmatic displacement", as one tone is replaced by another in the event that the new tone is present elsewhere in the adjacent tones. Usually, these processes of assimilation occur from left to right. In some languages of West Africa, for example, an unaccented syllable takes the tone from the closest tone to its left. However, in East and Southeast Asia, "paradigmatic replacement" is a more common form of tone sandhi, as one tone changes to another in a certain environment, whether or not the new tone is already present in the surrounding words or morphemes.

TODO: add examples of each

TODO: combine with the section below

Chen 1992:

Syntagmatic spread or movement occurs in African languages because of the abundance of toneless syllables.

Asian languages, on the other hand, prefer paradigmatic substitution due  to a one-to-one relationship between the tone and the tone-bearing unit (often the syllable or morpheme) and also due to the abundance of of contour tones.

This work essentially attributes the distribution of tonal processes to typological properties of the languages' tone systems.

Bao 1992 similarly attributes typological differences in tone sandhi to tonal structure and the prosodic category designated as the tone-bearing unit.

Common forms of tone sandhi
Works that compare tone sandhi systems across multiple languages have classified tone sandhi into left-dominant and right-dominant systems (Yue-Hashimoto 1987, Zhang 2017).

Tone sandhi in Sinitic languages can be classified with a left-dominant or right-dominant system. In a language of the right-dominant system, the right-most syllable of a word retains its citation tone (i.e., the tone in its isolation form). All the other syllables of the word must take their sandhi form. Taiwanese Southern Min is known for its complex sandhi system. Example: 鹹kiam5 'salty'; 酸sng1 'sour'; 甜tinn1 'sweet'; 鹹酸甜kiam7 sng7 tinn1 'candied fruit'. In this example, only the last syllable remains unchanged. Subscripted numbers represent the changed tone.

Left-dominant
"first-syllable-dominant"

initial tone spreads rightward

Left dominant: Shanghainese, Zsiga?

Khoekhoe language is an exception - Usually, in ``left-dominant systems,  tone spreads from the leftmost item across the sandhi domain, while in ``right-dominant systems,  tones are paradigmatically substituted on all items except the rightmost one in a domain \citet{yue1987tone,zhang2007directional}. Khoekhoegowab's left-dominant sandhi, however, substitutes each underlying tonal melody with an arbitrary second melody instead of making the tonal melody spread.

Right-dominant
"last-syllable-dominant"

tones are paradigmatically substituted on all items except the rightmost one in a domain

local default insertion in nonfinal positions

Mandarin T3, Taiwanese

How tone sandhi forms
Synchronic and diachronic motivations for tone sandhi

Phonetic
Phonetic motivations of tone sandhi often unclear or seemingly arbitrary (Zhang 2014, Chen 2000)

For one specific Northern Wu variety, Zhenhai, Rose (1990) finds phonetic motivations for tone sandhi on disyllabic lexical items via an experimental-based investigation into how the acoustic traits of 6 citation tones relate to their sandhi forms.

This is particularly important because prior to their study, phonetic motivations for tone sandhi were not clear.

The authors identify a few phonetically motivated factors for Zhenhai tone sandhi in disyllabic lexical items: stress effects, paradigmatic replacement of pitch or phonation type features, intrinsic effects associated with intervocalic consonants, phonation rate, and the duration of first syllable.

Phonological
Assimilation, dissimilation

Mandarin third tone sandhi as an Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) effect :

two tone 3 syllables next to each other:

/L.L/ -> don't want two Ls next to each other -> becomes LH.L (tone 2 + tone 3)

L.L -> LH.L

(period indicates a syllable boundary)

INSERT DIAGRAM

dissimilation

Diachronic
The introduction discusses Middle Chinese tones because the author argues that such a diachronic explanation can explain phonetically unnatural sandhi processes across various Chinese varieties.

Specifically, Middle Chinese tones can be used as natural classes for tone rules.

EXAMPLE FROM CHEN (2000)

Importantly, Chen comments that phonetically unnatural synchronic rules have had their earlier phonetic or functional origins obscured by diachronic sound change.

This includes the puzzling case of Taiwanese Hokkien tone circle.

Taiwanese tone circle is hard to explain phonologically / phonetically - don't use it as an introduction to tone sandhi

TODO: diachronic / areal effects (African langs, Asian langs)

TODO: why tone sandhi is more common in Asian tonal langs than African langs? Zsiga

TODO: we know that tone can spread areally (Gussenhoven 2004) but can tone sandhi spread areally?

What tone sandhi is and w hat it is not
Tone sandhi is compulsory as long as the environmental conditions that trigger it are met. It is not to be confused with tone changes that are due to derivational or inflectional morphology. For example, in Cantonese, the word "sugar" is pronounced tòhng ( or, with a low falling tone, whereas the derived word "candy" (also written 糖) is pronounced tóng (, with mid rising tone. Such a change is not triggered by the phonological environment of the tone, and therefore is not an example of sandhi. Changes of morphemes in Mandarin into their neutral-tone versions are also not examples of tone sandhi.

In Hokkien (again exemplified by Taiwanese varieties), the words kiaⁿ (whose citation tone is high level and means ‘to be afraid’) plus lâng (whose citation tone is rising and means ‘person, people’) can combine via either of two different tonal treatments with a corresponding difference in resulting meaning. A speaker can pronounce the lâng as a neutral-tone, here phonetically a low tone, which causes the immediately preceding kiaⁿ morpheme to retain its citation tone and thus not undergo tone sandhi. The result means ‘to be frightful’ (written in Pe̍h-ōe-jī as kiaⁿ--lâng).

However, one can instead cause the word to undergo tone sandhi, causing lâng to keep its citation tone, due to being the final non-neutral tone in the phonological phrase, and also causing the kiaⁿ to take its sandhi tone, mid level, due to its coming earlier in the phrase than the last non-neutral-tone syllable. This latter treatment means ‘to be frightfully dirty’ or ‘to be filthy’ (written as kiaⁿ-lâng). The former treatment does not involve the application of the tone sandhi rules, but rather is a derivational process (that is, it derives a new word), while the latter treatment does involve tone sandhi, which applies automatically (here as anywhere that a phrase contains more than one non-neutral tone syllable).

Chen (2000)


 * citation tone 單字調 - syllable spoken in isolation
 * preserves most contrasts
 * Treated as underlying / base tone
 * sandhi tones - tones associated with syllables in connected speech
 * tend to merge
 * Treated as surface / derived ton