Changed tone
Cantonese changed tones (also called pinjam;[1] traditional Chinese: 變音; simplified Chinese: 变音; pinyin: biànyīn; Jyutping: bin3jam1; Cantonese Yale: binyàm) occur when a word's tone becomes a different tone due to a particular context or meaning. A "changed" tone is the tone of the word when it is read in a particular lexical or grammatical context, while the base (or underlying) tone is usually the tone of the word when read in citation.[2] It is thus distinct from tone sandhi, which are automatic modifications of tone created by their phonetic environment, without regard to meaning. In its most common form, it occurs on the final syllable of either a compound word, a reduplicated word, or certain vocative examples, especially in direct address to people such as family members.[2] There are a limited set of semantic domains where changed tone occurs, generally associated with small things, familiarity, food and disease.[3]
A changed tone usually takes the form of a non-high level, non-mid rising tone (i.e. tones 3, 4, 5, and 6 in Jyutping and Yale; see Cantonese phonology for further information on the tones in Cantonese) transforming into a mid-rising tone (tone 2); for some speakers, this changed tone is slightly lower than the citation mid-rising tone. For speakers with the high falling tone, this may also become the high level tone via the same process.[1] In many speakers, another form of a changed tone used in specific vocatives that may also result in a high level tone (tone 1), rather than in a mid-level tone.[4]
Taishanese also exhibits changed tones. It is realized in some cases as an additional high floating tone to end of the mid level, low level, mid falling and low falling tones; this results in new contours for Taishanese, namely mid rising, low rising, mid dipping and low dipping respectively. The final pitch of these changed tones may be even higher in pitch than the citation high level tone. Another changed tone occurs where the expected tone is replaced by the low falling tone. These two are combined in certain cases, with the result that the expected tone is replaced by the low dipping tone, such as the change of the verb 刷 /tʃat˧/ "to brush" into the noun 刷 /tʃat˨˩˥/ "a brush". [5]
The use of a high rising tone in marking changed tone in many Yue varieties of Chinese implies one possible origin in diminutive morphemes, much in the same way that erhua functions in Standard Mandarin and in the Beijing dialect. In Cantonese, several diminutive morphemes have been proposed as the original one, among them 兒 /jiː˥/ "son" (in its high level tone form) and 子 /t͡siː˧˥/ "child". Thus the changed tone is the relic of this contraction of the main syllable with this diminutive.[1]
Notes
- (Yu 2007)
- (Yip and Matthews 2000)
- D Jurafsky "On the semantics of Cantonese changed tone or women, matches, and Chinese broccoli", Proceedings of the 14th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society. Available online, accessed 24 May 2018
- Alan C. L. Yu (publ. pending) "Tonal Mapping in Cantonese Vocative Reduplication", Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society. Available online, accessed 4 November 2011
- Teresa M. Cheng "The Phonology of Taishan", Journal of Chinese Linguistics, Vol. 1, No. 2 (May 1973), pp. 256-322.
References
- Yip, Virginia; Matthews, Stephen (2000). Intermediate Cantonese: A Grammar and Workbook. London, UK: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-19386-9.
- Yu, Alan C. L. (2007). "Understanding near mergers: The case of morphological tone in Cantonese" (PDF). Phonology. 24 (1): 187–214. doi:10.1017/S0952675707001157. Retrieved 5 December 2007.