Cantonese Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding are ...

changed tones (also called pinjam; ) 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. It is thus distinct from

tone sandhi Tone sandhi is a phonological change occurring in tonal languages, in which the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes change based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes. It usually simplifies a bidirectional tone into a ...

, 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. There are a limited set of semantic domains where changed tone occurs, generally associated with small things, familiarity, food and disease. 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 The standard pronunciation of Cantonese is that of Guangzhou, also known as Canton, the capital of Guangdong Province. Hong Kong Cantonese is related to the Guangzhou dialect, and the two diverge only slightly. Yue dialects in other parts of Gu ...

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. 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.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

Taishanese Taishanese (), alternatively romanized in Cantonese as Toishanese or Toisanese, in local dialect as Hoisanese or Hoisan-wa, is a dialect of Yue Chinese native to Taishan, Guangdong. Although it is related to Cantonese, Taishanese has little ...

also exhibits changed tones. It is realized in some cases as an additional high

floating tone A floating tone is a morpheme or element of a morpheme that contains neither consonants nor vowels, but only tone. It cannot be pronounced by itself but affects the tones of neighboring morphemes. An example occurs in Bambara, a Mande language o ...

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".Teresa M. Cheng "The Phonology of Taishan", Journal of Chinese Linguistics, Vol. 1, No. 2 (May 1973), pp. 256-322.

The use of a high rising tone in marking changed tone in many Yue Chinese, Yue varieties of Chinese implies one possible origin in diminutive morphemes, much in the same way that

erhua Erhua ( ); also called erization or rhotacization of syllable finals) is a phonological process that adds r-coloring or the "er" (注音：, common words: 、、) sound (transcribed in IPA as ) to syllables in spoken Mandarin Chinese. Erhuayin () i ...

functions in

Standard Mandarin Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern standar ...

and in the

Beijing dialect The Beijing dialect (), also known as Pekingese and Beijingese, is the prestige dialect of Mandarin spoken in the urban area of Beijing, China. It is the phonological basis of Standard Chinese, the official language in the People's Republic of ...

. 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.

Notes

References

* * {{cite journal , last = Yu , first = Alan C. L. , title = Understanding near mergers: The case of morphological tone in Cantonese , journal = Phonology , volume = 24 , issue = 1 , pages = 187–214 , year = 2007 , url = http://home.uchicago.edu/%7Eaclyu/papers/Phonology24.pdf , accessdate = 2007-12-05 , doi = 10.1017/S0952675707001157 Phonology