Research

Ohio State Dissertations in Linguistics (OSDL)

Gina Lee (1993)

Comparative, Diachronic and Experimental Perspectives on the Interaction between Tone and Vowel in Standard Cantonese

Advisor: Brian Joseph

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Abstract:

It is an established fact that tones and segments interact across languages. Though there is a considerable amount of evidence that tones interact with consonants, ther is also evidence that tones interact with vowels, specifically vowel quality. There has been less evidence that tones interact with vowel duration. One clear-cut case of such an interaction is found in Standard Cantonese, where historical "upper Entering" tone category has split into two tones, high and mid. The tones are, synchronically speaking, conditioned by the duration of the vowel - the high tone occuring in syllabels with phonetically short vowels, the mid occuring with phonetically long vowels. The traditional historical account of the tonal split is that it is the reflex of a Middle Chinese distinction between "inner" and "outer" rhyme groups, in which the inner groups originally had non-low nuclear vowels, and the outer groups low nuclear vowels. The phonetic evidence for such vowel-induced development is weak, especially when compared with data involving consonant-induced development of tones.

The current study examines the relationship between tone and vowel in Cantonese in detail, and considers whether it is an unusual case of tonogenesis, as suggested in O. Yue (1976). Evidence is presented that the tonal split occurred in Proto-Yue, the ancestor language of Standard Cantonese and other, closely related dialects. The question of the vowel-tone interaction as a language contact phenomenon is also explored, based on O. Yue (1976)'s suggestion that the interaction may be part of an areal pattern, or possibly even the result of a Tai substrate effect. The current study reveals that there is indeed a rather large areal pattern; in addition to Tai, varieties of Mon-Khmer and Tibeto-Burman are spoken in south China and surrounding areas in which there are similar interaction of some sort between tone and vowel duration. While the possibility of substratum influence in the areal diffusion of the tonal split cannot be ruled out, it is also plausible that it was due to a Chinese superstrate effect.