The Structure of Tone (review)

This book grew out of the author’s PhD dissertation (On the nature of tone, Cambridge: MIT dissertation, 1990), and its theoretical basis owes much to the guidance of Morris Halle. A better title might have been, ‘The structure of tone in Sinitic languages’ since the data analyzed come exclusively from Mandarin and the other seven mutually unintelligible dialect clusters commonly referred to as ‘Chinese’ (8–9). Because other language families with syllabic tone are generally omitted from the discussion, B’s theoretical descriptions focus exclusively on melodic register and contour, while nonmelodic tonal features involving glottalization or pharyngealization—so essential to the prosodic phonologies of many other Southeast Asian languages—fall beyond the scope of analysis. B describes his purpose (3) as addressing two central issues in nonlinear phonology: the internal structure, or ‘geometry’, of segments and tones, and the overall structure of phonological representations. The formal theoretical framework is autosegmental, with tonal melodies represented as branching trees that illustrate register plus contour.

In addition to the introduction (Ch. 1, 3–9), the book contains six chapters. Ch. 2 provides a balanced, informative survey of theories of Chinese tone beginning with Yuen Ren Chao’s still influential article ‘System of tone-letters’ (La Maitre Phonetique 45:24–47) which represented register and contour tones with number combinations based on a pitch scale of 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest). This chapter also contains a concise explanation of the tonal meta-categories developed by Classical Chinese philologists centuries ago which involve a distinction between yīn (relatively high) and yáng (relatively low) registers combined with four contours: píng, ‘even’; shǎng, ‘rising’; qù, ‘departing’; and rù, ‘entering’—the precise melodic nature of which remains undetermined. Subsequent chapters contain references to the evolution of tonal systems in the various modern Sinitic languages (or the development of literary vs. colloquial tone systems) from this earlier prototype. According to B, the modern tonal inventory of Songjian, a language of the Wu dialect family, appears to have preserved the original system most neatly (12). Ch. 3, ‘The representation of tone’, Ch. 4, ‘The autosegmental nature of tone’, and Ch. 5, ‘Tone in phonological representations’, then proceed to analyze tonal components based on the features [stiff] and [slack], a formalism which allows for the melodic tonal qualities of register and contour, respectively, to involve consonant onsets and codas as well as syllable nuclei, something not possible using sequences of numerical notations. Sandhi effects are also accounted for quite elegantly in B’s approach. Ch. 6 is devoted to the default status of mid tones and their role in sandhi phenomena. The final chapter, entitled ‘epilog’ (200–27), summarizes the study’s contributions toward a typological understanding of the difference between contour vs register tone languages. The book ends with a useful appendix containing charts illustrating the segmental and tonal phonology of ten Sinitic languages (229–39), a list of references (241–49), and an index (251–52).

While B provides an interesting synchronic and diachronic discussion of tonal melodies and their possible formal representations in various geographic and stylistic forms of Chinese, the book’s omission of nontonal features from consideration and exclusive concentration on a single family render his theoretical conclusions preliminary, pending a broader typological inquiry into the subject.