After reviewing three traditional approaches to the description of tones and their essential shortcomings in deriving the phonological structure of a tone language, the present paper describes the authors' own approach to extract both quantitative and qualitative characteristics of tones from the contours of fundamental frequency, and presents a novel framework for describing the phonological structure of the tone system of a tone language, based on the pattern of tone commands obtained from the fundamental frequency contours using the command-response model. The classification of tone command patterns is based on ternary distinction (positive-null-negative) of command polarity and binary distinction (early-late) of timing of occurrence of tone commands. The validity of the approach is demonstrated by several example languages including Mandarin, Shanghainese, Thai, Vietnamese and Lanqi. It is also shown that a finer distinction of tone command amplitude becomes necessary for the tone system of Cantonese.
Cite as: Fujisaki, H., Gu, W. (2006) Phonological representation of tone systems of some tone languages based on the command-response model for F0 contour generation. Proc. 2nd International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2006), 53-56
@inproceedings{fujisaki06b_tal,
author={Hiroya Fujisaki and Wentao Gu},
title={{Phonological representation of tone systems of some tone languages based on the command-response model for F0 contour generation}},
year=2006,
booktitle={Proc. 2nd International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2006)},
pages={53--56}
}