The Effects of Duration and Sonority on Countour Tone Distribution

Download or read book The Effects of Duration and Sonority on Countour Tone Distribution written by Jie Zhang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2002. Part of the Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics series, this is an in-depth investigation of the effects of duration and sonority on contour tone distribution. The term “tone language” usually refers to languages in which the pitch of a syllable serves lexical or grammatical functions. In some tone languages, the contrastive functions of pitch are sometimes played by pitch changes within a syllable. Pitch changes of this kind are called contour tones. The distribution of contour tones in a language, are when under what phonological contexts contour tones are more readily realized.