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Tone Rules and Tone Sandhi in Punjabi

Dr. Sukhvinder Singh Dept. of Punjabi Guru Nanak Dev University Regional Campus Jalandhar (Pb.) Email: essangha@yahoo.com/gmail.com

Pike (1948:3) defines as tonal any language having lexically significant, contrastive but relative pitch in each syllable. Thus, Pike advocates the theory of one tone per syllable. But this theory was rejected by many phonologists branding it as a very strong. Pike (1948:5) also draws a distinction between Register tone languages and Contour tone languages. In Register tone languages, tonal contrasts consist of different levels of steady pitch heights (cf.Hyman, 1975:214) and pitch neither falls nor rises. On the other hand, the Contour tone languages consist of tones which are not level in their production, rather they rise or fall from a particular pitch height. It could be from high to mid (H>M), high to low (M>L) or mid to low (M>L) and vice versa depending upon the phonological structure of a particular language. Most of African tone languages are of Register tone, whereas, on the other hand, Oriental languages are Contour tone languages (cf.Hyman, 1975:214). Punjabi too falls into the category of Contour tone language.