Why do Shanghainese tones behave like African languages?

[naus888]

Full article: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~duanmu/duration94.pdf

Excerpts below:

Appeared in Phonology 11:1-24, 1994

Syllabic Weight and Syllabic Duration: A Correlation between Phonology and Phonetics

San Duanmu

University of Michigan

This paper explores a correlation between phonology and phonetics. It first reviews a phonological analysis that proposes that all full Mandarin rimes are heavy and that all Shanghai rimes are underlyingly light. Then it reports a small phonetic experiment that attempts to determine whether there is a phonetic correlate for the phonological claim. Four Mandarin speakers and five Shanghai speakers were recorded, each reading five sentences four times at normal speed. Average syllable durations were determined. It is found that the average syllable duration in Mandarin was 215 ms and that in Shanghai was 162 ms. Statistics show that the durational difference is significant. The result thus agrees with the phonological analysis. Implications and limitations of the present study will be discussed.

We begin with a well-known difference between African tone languages and Asian tone languages. In African tone languages, "contour tones" (e.g., rise, fall, fall-rise, rise-fall) are analyzable as a sequence of level tones, in that a rise is LH (low and high), a fall is HL, a fall-rise is HLH, and so on (Leben 1973, Williams 1976, Goldsmith 1976, and many subsequent works in multi-tiered phonology).

In Asian tone languages, however, a contour tone does not usually split into a sequence of level tones, even if there are toneless syllables that could share it.

.....

It has been noted, however, that some Chinese languages, in particular those in the Wu dialect family, behave just like African languages and unlike other Chinese languages. The best known case is Shanghai (also called "New Shanghai" or "Mainstream Shanghai" by Xu et al 1988).

As in Mandarin, the Shanghai syllable mu 'to grind' has a rise when said alone. But unlike Mandarin, when mu is followed by the toneless Aspect marker le in (5b), the rise splits into a L on the first syllable and a H on the second (see Jin 1986, Yip 1980, Selkirk and Shen 1990, Duanmu 1993, among others). The analysis of (5) is given in (6), which is exactly what we saw in (2) for the African language Margi. The behavior of Shanghai tones raises a question for the popular view, namely, what makes Shanghai, and some of its neighboring dialects, behave like African languages and unlike other Chinese languages? In addition, mo in Mandarin and mu in Shanghai are cognate words, whose present tones are derived from the same historical tone. What sound change led to a contour tone unit in one and a cluster of L and H in the other?

The following summary shows the systematic correlation between rime type and tone sandhi patterns.

Cantonese M

Xiamen M

Meixian M

Mandarin M

Fuzhou M

-------------------------------------

New Shanghai (Wu) S

Old Shanghai (Wu) S

Suzhou (Wu) S

Danyang (Wu) S

Shaoxing (Wu) S

Nantong (Wu) S

All languages above the line have contrastive codas and diphthongs. All languages below the line lack contrastive codas and diphthongs. In addition, all languages above the line behave like Mandarin in regard to tone sandhi (M-languages), namely, when full syllables occur together, they largely keep their own tones and contour tones do not split into level tones. In contrast, all languages below the line behave like Shanghai in regard to tone sandhi (S-languages), namely, only the underlying tones of the domain7 initial syllable are　kept and contour tones can split into level tones (cf. Zee and Maddieson 1979, Xu　et al 1988, Selkirk and Shen 1990 for New Shanghai; Sherard 1972, Shen 1981a-　b, 1982, Xu et al 1988 for Old Shanghai; Ye 1979, Xie 1982, Qian and Shi 1983　for Suzhou; L

[Claw]

I'm not very familiar with Japanese, but I've heard that the tone contour in Shanghainese is also similar to tone contour in Japanese?

Anyway, I found an interesting link at zanhe.com that talks about the same phenomenon: http://www.zanhe.com/pitch.html. It gives a good overview but is not nearly as academic as the article you posted. It does use that article, in addition to other articles, as a reference though.

[f'yor-fei]

My friend seems to have the impression that French sounds are similar to Shanghainese. Personally, I don't see any resemblance.