Vietnamese tone: Tone is not pitch (2001)

This thesis is an in-depth study of the phonology & phonetics of tones in Northern Vietnamese dialects. It examines tone within the framework of markedness theory, the phonetic realizations of tones, the relationship between the phonetics & phonology of tones, & the implications of the proposed analysis for other dialects of Vietnamese. First, I propose a phonological model in which tones are structurally organized. In this model, tones are grouped together as constituents according to their markedness relationship. Evidence for the structural organization of tones comes from neutralization in dialects & reduplication, & also from tonal frequency in the language, poetry, borrowings, & clitics. This evidence points to tones having two major constituents, contour & register, each of which can pattern independently. Second, I show that the proposed features are grounded phonetically. I argue that instead of pitch height being contrastive as is generally assumed, it is phonation types of creakiness & breathiness which are distinctive as the register feature in North Vietnamese, & the differences in pitch heights are predictable. In the Vietnamese literature, it is claimed that there is a mismatch between the phonetics & phonology of two tones, hoi & nga, in reduplication. Flip-flop rules were suggested to account for the mismatch. I show that using phonation types as distinctive features not only can explain various tonal patterns in the language, it also makes this mismatch an illusory one, which, in turns, makes ad hoc flip-flop rules in previous models unnecessary. In addition, I argue that the domain of Vietnamese tone is not the syllable or mora, but the rhyme, & that the crucial portion for distinguishing the tones is the middle point in hoi & nga, & the endpoint in other tones. Finally, I show that the model correctly predicts certain types of neutralization in other Vietnamese dialects, in language acquisition, & in other tone languages