ABSTRACT
In Tiānjīn dialect and standard Mandarin there are four tones for stressed syllables,1 although the tones for each dialect exhibit distinctive phonetic shapes. According to the standard practice of indicating extremes of pitch contours on a five-point scale (with five being the highest pitch), the tones of each dialect may be graphed as shown in Figure A1.1. The short vertical line on the right is a reference line for the simple graph to the left that indicates the starting and
ending pitches of the tone, and, in the case of the dipping tones, the turning point. In the main, however, when tones are indicated in the romanization of modern Mandarin, a simpler system of notation is used: the first tone is notated as -, the second tone as /, the third tone as ˇ, and the fourth tone as ̀. In the musical transcriptions that follow, I shall use this simpler notation of tone for Mandarin, and the graph notation for the few examples of Tiānjīn dialect in order to distinguish the two.2
