A fresh look at the paradoxal nature of Chinese contour tones

In the literature of tonology, it is generally assumed that contour tones are more marked than level tones, as they are more 'complicated', or more difficult to produce and perceive (Yip 2002, Zhang 2002). This hypothesis fails to explain why there are Chinese dialects with only contour tones, and why there is no tonal system having only level tones in Chinese dialects. On the basis of a universal tonal periodic skeleton HLHL postulated by Carvalho (2002), we propose a tonal representation capable of naturally accounting for the notion of tonal markedness, the interaction between contour and register, and diverse sandhi systems of Chinese dialects. By comparison with current models in which tonal markedness and licit contours are obtained by stipulation, the present framework yields a completely different picture of tonal markedness. It provides furthermore a unified explanation to the paradoxical nature of Chinese contour tones and offers a straightforward account of the concordant relationship between citation tones and sandhi behavior.