Abstract:
Recent acoustic studies of Taiwan Mandarin citation tones reveal dis¬agree-ment about whether Tone 2 is dipping or rising and whether Tone 3 is falling or dipping. The present study surveys 33 informants who were subdivided by age, gender and language back¬ground. We can generalize that older groups and females are collectively more conserva¬tive than their respective counterparts, and likewise that monolinguals and females are collectively more stable than their respective counterparts. We speculate that the primary motivation for this tonetic change is reanalysis of fixed contour patterns by a new genera¬tion of speakers, redetermining which portion is meaningful and then making phonetic adjustments to render the newly meaningful part more salient and the remaining back¬ground noise less so. When a newly acquired toneme contour comes to resemble the existing contour of another toneme, the second toneme is forced to read-just in order to main¬tain perceptual distance. This case study offers a plausi¬ble model for tonetic sound change in any lexical tone language and helps explain why Chinese exhibits rich diversity in tonetic details across speech communities that are otherwise genetically and geogra¬phic¬ally very close.
