ABSTRACT
This chapter documents the results of a typological survey of the positional prominence effects regarding contour tones. Specially, I examine the contexts in which contour tones are more likely to occur cross-linguistically, and through this examination, I aim to test the hypothesis that the distribution of contour tones reflects the phonetic correlation between the duration and sonority of the rime on the one hand, and the contour tones the syllable is able to carry on the other, and see whether the direct approach to contour tone distribution is superior to the other approaches. As I have mentioned in §1.4.3, this is also a test case for the contrast-specificity hypothesis of positional prominence in general, since the phonetic properties that are crucial for contour tones might not be crucial for other phonological contrasts. Then if the occurrence of contour tones is sensitive to these phonetic properties per se, we know that positional prominence is not a generic phenomenon that applies in the same fashion to all contrasts, in other words, it is contrast-specific. The data will also bear on the relevance of the phonetically-based, fine-grained concept C Contour in phonological patterning, since only through such a concept can the distribution of contour tones be captured in a uniform fashion and at the same time be distinguished from the distribution of other phonological features in a principled way.
