Tones and intonation in Sinitic languages
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Hallelujah! Julesy (julesytooshoes) to the rescue again!
"It’s Not Just Tones: Chinese ALSO Has Intonation" (two weeks ago)
She's a real linguist
Her explanations are sensible and scientific
She responsibly summarizes decades of scholarly investigations.
This is the second presentation by Julesy that I have brought before Language Log readers. If you find them interesting, she has many other quality videos on her various platforms and media series. I recommend them to you with warm enthusiasm.
Selected readings
- *The conundrum of singing with tones" (5/30/25) — together with all the bibliographical references cited there
- "When intonation overrides tone, part 6" (5/9/21) — and take a look at the previous 5 iterations of this series
- "Really?! (12/27/16)
- "OMG moments induced by allegro forms in Pekingese" (1/26/12)
cameron said,
May 30, 2025 @ 6:19 pm
so in Mandarin the intonation pattern for questions tends to exaggerate the tonal contours. very interesting.
do other Chinese languages show similar patterns? have there been studies analogous to the ones cited in the video for Cantonese, etc?
JMGN said,
May 31, 2025 @ 4:24 am
Wiedenhof's tones representation; thoughts?
https://ibb.co/3y7n5Pd0
Jonathan Smith said,
May 31, 2025 @ 9:34 am
Not "exaggerate the contours" exactly: to quote Yuan, Shih & Kochanski (2002), we see "an overall higher phrase curve for the interrogative, and higher strength values of sentence final tones" — and note this relates to "interrogative intonation" applied to strings which uttered otherwise would be statements, not to structural questions.
But yes Hallelujah indeed for this useful Youtube account of the modulatory effects of intonation patterns on lexical tone. Cf. e.g. comments on this thread of many years ago.
David Marjanović said,
May 31, 2025 @ 10:25 am
Included in every textbook, and accurate as long as there's no intonation.
Jason M said,
May 31, 2025 @ 5:06 pm
Even thought the final tone 4 question had more exaggerated fall, the curve showed a final tail that broke the fall. The declarative just fell and stopped. The question fell a longer way but had a short final recovery. I don’t know if a native listener would hear that slight rise at the end?
Victor Mair said,
June 1, 2025 @ 2:32 am
From Daan Pan:
Singing a Chinese song is different from intoning a Chinese poem. We may have heard some scholars “intone” poems from Shi-jing or Tang poems, but whether they did so the same way ancient people did remains uncertain. Many contemporary intoners claim authenticity but how to verify their claim remains to be seen.
(Also posted as a comment to the Julesy tones and singing thread.)