Tones in Zhangzhou

This book explores the nature of tones in Zhangzhou, an under-described Southern Min variety, based on quantitative analyses of data from 21 native speakers. It will interest students and linguists studying tone in languages of China and elsewhere in the world, in particular as an exemplar in the use of statistical methods to test and establish phonological categories in language. The study finds that realisations of Zhangzhou tones are multidimensional and that Zhangzhou has eight tones, overturning previous studies of seven tones based on the preservation of Middle Chinese tonal categories. The results presented here also suggest that the nature of Zhangzhou tones is morphological. The relationship between sandhi and citation tones is shown to be morphophonemic, while the relationship between phrase-final and citation tones is allophonic.