TONAL ACCENT
See PITCH ACCENT.

TONAL CENTER OF GRAVITY
(Phonetics) Abbreviated TCoG. A gestalt or global measure of F₀ event localization that succeeds in accounting both for the demonstrated contributions of F₀ TP-alignment, and for the strength of global F₀ contour shape as cues to intonational contrasts, while referring directly to neither of these things. The TCoG model lies at the heart of a research program whose goal, broadly expressed, is to develop a more robust and perceptually realistic model of tonal timing and scaling patterns than currently exists; one that captures key configurationist insights (i.e., the relevance of contour shape in tonal implementation), but nonetheless maintains the core advantages of a level-based Autosegmental-Metrical (Pierrehumbert 1980, Ladd 2008) phonology. | Jonathan Barnes, Nanette Veilleux, Alejna Brugos and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2012

TONE CHANGE

1. (Phonology) In standard Cantonese as spoken in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China, there is a very complex phenomenon known as bianyin in Chinese, or tone change. This involves an alternation between any of the six non-high tones and the high rising tone, and for a very limited number of morphemes, an alternation between any tone and the high level tone.
    For example, tone change is found in verb reduplication and adjective reduplication, as shown in (1).
    
   1. a. [haːŋ21 jat5 haːŋ21] [haːŋ35 haː21] 'to take a walk'
      b. [ŋaːu23 jat5 ŋaːu23] [ŋaːu35 ŋaː23] 'to bite once'
      c. [hUŋ21 jat hUŋ21]  [hUŋ35 hUŋ21]  'very red'
      d. [paːk2 jat5 paːk2]  [paːk35 paːk2]  'very white'
   
   
   • The Tone Notation
     •  [55], [5] = high level
     •  [35] = high rising
     •  [33], [3] = mid level
     •  [21] = low falling
     •  [23] = low rising
     •  [22], [2] = low level
   
    In these examples, the two alternate forms are two ways of saying the same thing. | Maurice Kuen-Shing Wong, 1982
2. (Phonology) Tone change must be distinguished from tone sandhi. Tone sandhi is a compulsory change that occurs when certain tones are juxtaposed. Tone change, however, is a morphologically conditioned alternation and is used as an inflectional or a derivational strategy (Chen 2000). Lien indicated that causative verbs in modern Southern Min are expressed with tonal alternation, and that tonal alternation may come from earlier affixes.
    Examples (Lien 1999):
    
   1.  長 tng5 'long' vs. tng2 'grow';
   2.  斷 tng7 'break' vs. tng2 'cause to break'
   
    Also, 毒 in Taiwanese Southern Min has two pronunciations (Taiwan Ministry of Education 2019):
    
   3. a. to̍ (entering tone) meaning 'poison' or 'poisonous'
      b. thāu (departing tone) meaning 'to kill with poison'
   
    The same usage can be found in Min, Yue, and Hakka (吳瑞文 2005). | Wikipedia, 2024

TONE CONTOUR
(Phonology) Or, contour tone. A tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East, Southeast Asia, West Africa, Nilo-Saharan languages, Khoisan languages, Oto-Manguean languages and some languages of South America.

• When the pitch descends, the contour is called a falling tone.
• When it ascends, a rising tone.
• When it descends and then returns, a dipping or falling-rising tone.
• When it ascends and then returns, a peaking or rising-falling tone.

TONE CONTOUR SHAPE
(Phonology) There has been a long line of research on the variability of tone contour shapes as well as interfacing between other linguistic factors and prosody (Li 2009, Büring 2013). In linguistic research of Mandarin tones, most works have focused on the effect of local tonal context (e.g., neighboring tones and pitch range, such as Gauthier et al. 2007 and Xu 1997) and broader context (e.g., focus, topic, information structure, long term f₀ variations, such as Xu et al. 2004, Liu et al. 2006, Wang and Xu 2011). The data in these works usually consisted of a small number of tone observations obtained in speech production experiments in the lab. They have informed later works on improving the performance of supervised or unsupervised tone recognition (Levow 2005, Surendran 2007, etc.). | Shuo Zhang, 2019

TONE LANGUAGE
(Phonology) A language in which differences in meaning can be signaled by differences in pitch. E.g. Nupe (spoken in Nigeria):

• bá (high) 'be sour'
• ba (mid) 'cut'
• bà (low) 'count'

TONE SANDHI
(Phonology) From the Sanskrit word सधि sandhi 'joining'. 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 (Yip 2002). It usually simplifies a bidirectional tone into a one-direction tone (Wang 1967). It is a type of sandhi, or fusional change.
 Tone sandhi occurs to some extent in nearly all tonal languages, manifesting itself in different ways (Gandour 1978).
 Tone sandhi is compulsory as long as the environmental conditions that trigger it are met. It is not to be confused with tone changes that are due to derivational or inflectional morphology. Such a change is not triggered by the phonological environment of the tone, and therefore is not an example of sandhi. Changes of morphemes in Mandarin into its neutral-tone are also not examples of tone sandhi. | Wikipedia, 2022

TONOGENESIS

1. (Phonology) The historical orgin of tone. A process in which a language that lacks tones gains them. E.g.:
   
   • Tones can originate from earlier consonantal contrasts.
   • A language may acquire tones through bilingualism if influential neighboring languages are tonal.
   • Tone may arise spontaneously, and surprisingly quickly.
   • Very often, tone arises as an effect of the loss or merger of consonants.
   
    | ?
2. (Phonology) The development of distinctive tone from earlier non-tonal contrasts. A well-understood case is that of Vietnamese (similar in its essentials to that of Chinese and many languages of the Tai-Kadai and Hmong-Mien language families), where the loss of final laryngeal consonants led to the creation of three tones, and the tones later multiplied as voicing oppositions on initial consonants waned.
    This is by no means the only attested diachronic scenario, however. There is tonogenetic potential in various series of phonemes:
    
   • Glottalized vs. plain consonants.
   • Unvoiced vs. voiced.
   • Aspirated vs. unaspirated.
   • Geminates vs. simple (and, more generally, tense vs. lax).
   • Even among vowels, whose intrinsic fundamental frequency can transphonologize to tone.
   
    But the way in which these common phonetic precursors to tone play out in a given language depends on phonological factors, as well as on other dimensions of a language's structure and on patterns of language contact, resulting in a great diversity of evolutionary paths in tone systems. In some language families (such as Niger-Congo and Khoe), recent tonal developments are increasingly well-understood, but working out the origin of the earliest tonal contrasts (which are likely to date back thousands of years earlier than tonogenesis among Sino-Tibetan languages, for instance) remains a mid- to long-term research goal for comparative-historical research. | Alexis Michaud and Bonny Sands, 2020

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