Re: Lots of Questions About Tones (more questions)

On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:38:36 -0400, Alex Fink <000024@...> wrote:

>[snip]
>An unfortunate collision with the meaning of "register" that is 'complex of
>tone and phonation and other knock-on effects'.
Yep.

>[snip]
>Can there, or will there, be default numbered pitch levels for the tones in
>a contour(s1) tone language?
I think that will depend on the IPA and maybe on the linguist discussing the
language.
The IPA has
1 eXtra Low
2 Low
3 Medium
4 High
5 eXtra High

Most languages with phonemic/lexical/morphological have just two pitches,
High and Low; most of the rest have just three, High, Low, and Medium.

If a language has four relevant pitches, it seems to me the natural terminology
would be "Extra Low, Low, High, and Extra High"; but this could cause a
problem if the numbers used were {1, 2, 4, 5}, because it could make it seem
that a 24 (L-H) rise was not allotonic with a 12 (XL-L) rise and a 45 (H-XH)
rise, whereas it probably is. Of course the same applies to the falls; 42 is
probably allotonic with 21 and 54.  And it carries over into those peaks, dips,
etc. that include such a rise or fall.

So maybe you want to use {1, 2, 3, 4} or {2, 3, 4, 5} for a language with four
relevant pitches, but no relevance to "absolute pitch".

And, of course, if there is a problem if a language has six relevant pitches.  I'm
not sure there are any such languages.  The IPA doesn't appear to have heard
of them, if there are.

>Or are the realisations of the tones supposed to be completely in free
>variation?
I'd imagine they're in complementary distribution and are conditioned, at least
partially, by other factors, including perhaps both tonal sandhi and co-
occurring segmental features.  I'm not sure that counts as "completely free
variation"; does it?

The point is they're "allotones", or at least that's what I expect and
understand.

>Or something else?
Is "allotones" something else?

>If you're just reporting the results of a discrimination task on single
>words each from different speakers presented in isolation, I could see this
>even for speakers of a language without a contour(s1) tone system.  Surely
>register(s1) tonality doesn't imply perfect pitch.
I'm not sure what you said.
I doubt I'd disagree if I understood perfectly, but I understand only partially.
Could you explain, please?

And, by the way:

Thanks!