ABSTRACT
The term “tone language” usually refers to languages in which the pitch of a syllable serves lexical or grammatical functions. In some tone languages, the contrastive functions of pitch are sometimes played by pitch changes within a syllable. Pitch changes of this kind are called contour tones. The distribution of contour tones in a language, i.e., under what phonological contexts contour tones are more readily realized, has been of much theoretical interest, as it sheds light on both the representation of tone (Woo 1969, Leben 1973, Goldsmith 1976, Bao 1990, Duanmu 1990, 1994a, Yip 1989, 1995) and the relation between phonetics and phonology (Duanmu 1994b, Gordon 1998, Zhang 1998). This work is an in-depth investigation of the distribution of contour tones.
