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Recurring patterns in tone (chain) shift

  • Cathryn Yang ORCID logo EMAIL logo , Pittayawat Pittayaporn and James Kirby
Published/Copyright: May 22, 2025
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard

Abstract

This study investigates directional constraints on diachronic tone chain shifts and their applicability to non-chain shifts. Twenty-eight chain shift changes from 12 Sino-Tibetan, Kra-Dai, Austronesian, and Otomanguean languages were compared to a sample of 118 non-chain shifts (including merger) from 54 Asian tone languages. Significant overlap was found: the reported chain shift changes were also the most frequently occurring changes in non-chain shifts. Recurring patterns emerged in both chain shifts and non-chain shifts: (1) tonal alignment slides rightward, with effects on contour shape, f0 excursion and f0 onset height; and (2) falling tones become higher while rising tones lower. These crosslinguistic diachronic trends show parallels to tone variation in connected speech, which suggests that the direction of diachronic tone change is phonetically grounded, constrained by articulatory and cognitive biases in speech production and perception.


Corresponding author: Cathryn Yang, SIL International, 7500 W Camp Wisdom, Dallas, 75236, TX, USA, E-mail:

Award Identifier / Grant number: 758605

Funding source: SIL International

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the attendees of the 25th International Conference of Historical Linguistics (2022), the members of the Evotone research group, especially Francesco Burroni, and also area editor Yao Yao and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions, which helped to substantially improve this manuscript. We are grateful to Sathon Thaiklang for his work on summarizing case studies written in Thai. Any errors or oversights remain the sole responsibility of the authors.

  1. Research funding: This project was partially supported by SIL International and by the European Research Council (ERC StG 758605).

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Supplementary Material

This article contains supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2024-0028).


Received: 2024-02-14
Accepted: 2025-02-12
Published Online: 2025-05-22

© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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