[falling tone] / [falling pitch]

Definition

The feature [falling tone] refers to a negative pitch contour in which the larynx stretches and contracts more slowly to lower the rate of vocal cord vibrations to a degree that is meaningful compared to the speaker’s base pitch and surrounding syllabic and acoustic data (Goldsmith 1976).  This can exist on a more local (e.g., the syllable as the primary prosodic unit) or global (e.g., the sentence) scale.

Purpose

Chinese famously has a five-part minimal set differing only in tone because it is a tone language.  Inflected with different tones (i.e., [high tone], [elevated tone] or [rising tone], [concave tone], [falling tone], and neutral) /ma/ can become ‘mother,’ ‘hemp,’ ‘horse,’ ‘scold, an interrogative particle.  Because ‘scold’starts with a high pitch and ends with a low pitch it exhibits a negative pitch contour, represented by the feature [+falling tone].  This could also be mapped in a prosodic hierarchical structure in which the syllable exhibits first [+high tone] and then [+low tone].  Alternatively, this tone contour could be represented as HL as in autosegmental phonology, first described by Goldsmith (1976).

History

Chomsky and Halle (1968) declined to touch on pitch, stating in their preface that they neglected to include pitch in SPE because they felt they had nothing to “add to the study of phonetics of intonation and phonological theory as [they] so far understand it,” later researchers treated [falling tone], or any of its synonyms, as its own distinctive feature.

Remijsen (2013) argued that this feature is not complex enough to cover some natural languages because Dinka contrasts lexical items based on alignment of tone contours within a syllable, which contrasts several papers of the past, such as Odden (1995:450) who proclaimed that this contrast would “only be phonetic, never phonological.”

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

Remijsen, Bert. 2013. Tonal alignment is contrastive in falling contours in Dinka. Language 89(2).297–327.

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

Further Reading

Clements, G. N., Alexis Michaud, and Cédric Patin. 2011. Do we need tone features? Tones and Features: Phonetic and Phonological Perspectives, ed. by John A. Goldsmith et al, 3-24. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Author

Allon Boettcher