| This dissertation is concerned with the prosodic aspects of phonology, in particular, with the status of tone in current phonological theories. It starts with a review of the various treatments of tone in modern linguistics, followed by an exposition of the proposals and issues concerning the formal representation of tone. To address inadequacies in recent models which often downplay the prosodic nature of tone, this thesis proposes that tone should properly be related to other prosodic entities such as stress. In this proposal tone, like all other prosodic entities, is thought to originate in the prosodic hierarchy. Through a process termed "percolation," tone is realized by articulatory features at the segmental feature levels. The theoretical implications of this prosodic tone model mainly include the following points. (1) It is predicted that tone interacts with other prosodic systems and with segments, since tone originates as a prosodic entity but is also represented by features at the segmental levels. (2) The proposed model makes specific predictions which have been empirically confirmed regarding the possible types of tone systems, based on the relation between rhyme structure and surface tonal complexity, and the possible types of spreading (i.e., assimilation) processes. With regard to prosodic interactions, we find a rich interplay between stress (i.e., prosodic prominence) and tone in the three Chinese languages examined in Chapter Four. What were previously treated as purely tone sandhi phenomena are found to be the products of the interaction between tone and prosodic prominence. Lastly, the prosodic nature of tone is further corroborated by an examination of tone sandhi rules in Mandarin dialects. |
