[low tone] / [low pitch]

Counterpart

[non low tone] [non low pitch]

Feature System

Definition

The feature [low tone] refers to a sound segment whose pitch is lowered such that it meaningfully contrasts the speaker’s base pitch and surrounding acoustic and syllabic context. This is produced through lowering the rate of vibrations of the vocal cords through allowing for fewer contractions of the larynx (Goldsmith 1976). Importantly, this is a diacritic feature referring to pitch, which can distinguish lexical meanings from one another and patterns with systematical phonotactic restrictions in the world’s languages. The feature [low] does not describe sentence prosody.

For [low] as a vowel feature, see [low].

Purpose

Chinese famously has a five-part minimal set differing only in tone. Inflected with different tones (i.e., [high], [elevated] or [rising], [concave], and [falling]) /ma/ can become ‘mother,’ ‘hemp,’ ‘horse,’ or ‘scold.’ ‘Mother’ is [+high], while ‘hemp’ and ‘horse’ vary in pitch. ‘Hemp’ starts as [+high] but becomes [+low], meaning it is overall [falling], while ‘horse’ starts [+high], becomes [+low], and then raises again to [+high], making it [concave].

Kuki-Thaadow has rules of both H- and L-spreading (Hyman 2010). For example, /kà zóoŋ ɡùup/ (L-H-L) ➝ [kà zóoŋ ɡûup] (L-L-HL) ‘my six monkees’.

History

Cognominally, [low] can refer to a distinctive feature regarding phones produced with a lowering of the tongue body below the level that it maintains in the neutral position, which is raised and fronted. William Yang was among the first to introduce [low] in reference to pitch and discuss it as a tonal feature acting as part of a greater system of distinctive features.

In the preface of Sound Patterns of English, Chomsky and Halle (1968) “omitted pitch from consideration because [they] have nothing to add to the study of phonetics of intonation and phonological theory as [they] so far understand it.”

Goldsmith argued that tones such as [high] and [low], also sometimes represented as H or L, should be represented on a separate tonal tier that can associate with, spread across, or detach from syllables independently. Duanmu (1999) described that tones inhibit different units of oral language in different languages; for example, the primary unit of tone in Mandarin is the syllable.

References

Chomsky, Noam, and Morris Halle. 1968. The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper and Row.

Duanmu, San. 1999. Metrical structure and tone: Evidence from Mandarin and Shanghai. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 8(1). 1–38. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008353028173

Hyman, Larry M. 2010. Kuki-Thaadow: An African tone system in Southeast Asia. Essais de typologie et de linguistique générale, ed. by Franck Floricic, 31-51. Lyon: Presses de l’École Normale Supérieure.

Wang, William S.-Y. 1967. Phonological features of tone. International Journal of American Linguistics 33(2).93–105. https://doi.org/10.1086/464946

Author

Allon Boettcher