Rising Tones in Naxi: The Historical Origin of the Lexical Rising Tone Seen through Synchronic Distributional Types and Diachronic Development
This paper by He Likun and Alexis Michaud investigates the rising tone in the Piandeng (Lijiang-plain) dialect of Naxi, arguing that Naxi rising tones fall into two distinct classes despite surfacing similarly. The first is a true lexical rising tone, found mainly in Chinese loanwords that historically carried the checked (rusheng) tone, and only sparsely in native vocabulary (chiefly closed-class items like pronouns, conjunctions, ideophones, and baby-talk words). The second comprises four non-lexical rising contours produced by syllable coalescence and grammatical tone sandhi. Using fieldwork data and level-tone analysis, the authors show some coalescence-derived rising tones are lexicalizing into the lexical rising tone, a process constrained by phonetic and syntactic environment. They argue this offers indirect evidence that the native-word lexical rising tone historically arose through similar coalescence, rather than solely from Chinese contact. The findings refine earlier accounts and add new evidence to Tibeto-Burman tonal typology.
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