Lexical tone or foot structure in Hong Kong English? A response to Lian-Hee Wee

Lexical tone or foot structure in Hong Kong English? A response to Lian-Hee Wee

As is common in work on prosodic typology, the notions 'tone' and 'stress' play a key role in Wee's 2016 study of the tone system of Hong Kong English (HKE). Based on the absence of phonetic correlates of stress and the distribution of tone in polysyllabic words, Wee claims...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Language (Baltimore) 2019-09, Vol.95 (3), p.e394-e405
Main Authors: Köhnlein, Björn, Dickerson, Carly, Leow, James, Chávez, Paloma Pinillos
Format: Article
Language:eng
Subjects:
China
Dialects
English language
Foot
Hong Kong
Language typology
Morphology
Occupational stress
Phonetics
Phonology
Prosody
South Asian English
Stress
Tone
Tone (Phonetics)
Wee, Lian-Hee
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:As is common in work on prosodic typology, the notions 'tone' and 'stress' play a key role in Wee's 2016 study of the tone system of Hong Kong English (HKE). Based on the absence of phonetic correlates of stress and the distribution of tone in polysyllabic words, Wee claims that HKE must have lexical (high) tone. In this reply, we argue that, even in the absence of phonetic correlates of stress, foot structure provides a more parsimonious account of the distribution of surface tones. Multiple high tones within words follow from predictable morphological structure and/or tonal spreading, rather than from lexical tone.
ISSN:0097-8507
1535-0665
1535-0665