Falling and rising "edge tones" in Mandarin Chinese: Re-opening the discussion on Yuen Ren Chao's "successive tonal additions"

Since its first discussion by Y. R. Chao in the early 20th century (1933, 1968), the phenomenon he referred to as "successive tonal addition" has been highly controversial. According to Chao, this intonation phenomenon expresses different moods and attitudes and manifests itself as rising and falling, non-lexical, pitch-movements added to the lexical contours of utterance-final syllables. Due to the lack of technological means at the time Chao could offer no instrumental evidence for his claims. Since 2004, numerous falling and rising pitch-phenomena reminiscent of Chao's "successive tonal additions" have been observed by this author, who refers to "utterance-final edge tones" (Ju wei jiayin句尾加音) (Mueller-Liu 2004, 2006, 2008).

Expanding these earlier publications and containing new, hitherto unpublished data, this paper is a detailed account of the author's findings, including acoustic analyses of these pitch-phenomena and a conscientious description of their attitudinal messages and the discourse contexts in which they are found. The similarities and differences between falling and rising edge tones and Chao's falling and rising "successive tonal additions" are also discussed in detail.