Syllable structure is systematically related to tone patterning in two dimensions: sonority and duration. The reasons for this are fundamentally phonetic: syllable weight is determined by the sonority and duration profile of the rhyme, which themselves are the phonetic correlates of tone. This paper uses the Moraic Model [1] to analyze the weight-mediated syllable-tone patterning in four distinct Chinese languages, and a perceptually-based approach to provide a functional explanation. It is found that a one-to-one patterning between weight and tone units is more commonly found in Chinese languages, whereas the one-to-many patterning between units of the two tiers is much less common.
DOI: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2016-21
Luo, M. (2016) A perceptually-based approach to Chinese syllable-tone patterning. Proc. Speech Prosody 2016, 99-103.
@inproceedings{Luo2016,
author={Mingqiong Luo},
title={A perceptually-based approach to Chinese syllable-tone patterning},
year=2016,
booktitle={Speech Prosody 2016},
doi={10.21437/SpeechProsody.2016-21},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2016-21},
pages={99--103}
}