Tonal Distribution in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Earlier literature on tones of Chinese tends to report the tonal inventory and tone sandhi observed in a certain variety of the language. However, given that Chinese is one of the major tonal languages, a typological investigation of Chinese tones is needed to achieve a better understanding of not only the tonal systems of the Chinese varieties but also the universals of tones across languages. To understand the Mandarin tones from a typological perspective, this study examines the tonal distribution patterns in 518 tonal languages collected in PHOBLIE and compares them with the tonal distribution analyzed from a Mandarin lexicon corpus. Results of a quantitative analysis of the two corpora reveal several important typological features of the tone types and distribution of Mandarin as well as tonal languages in general: (1) Approximately 63% of the tonal languages contain 2 or 3 tone types, and about 19% of the languages, including Mandarin, contain 4 tone types, (2) Implicational relation between tone types (e.g., the existence of contour tone(s) implies the existence of level tone(s)) are observed both across tonal languages and in Mandarin. (3) The distribution pattern of ‘level tone simple contour tone complex contour tone’, which is in negative relation with tone markedness, is found across tonal languages. However, falling tone(T4) being the most frequently occurring tone type, Mandarin shows the distribution of ‘simple contour tone level tone complex contour tone’.