This chapter reviews the descriptive patterns of tone sandhi in Chinese dialects along with the experimental investigations of what generalizations native speakers make regarding these patterns, how they process them in production and perception, and how children acquire these patterns. Theoretical issues that tone sandhi sheds light on, including the role of typology in synchronic theories, feature representation, productivity and learnability, and the interface between phonology and other domains such as phonetics, processing, and morphosyntax, are also discussed briefly. The chapter focuses on the interdisciplinary nature of tone sandhi research and calls on researchers to take an open and synergistic approach among different methods to gain an comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon.

This chapter reviews studies on contextual tonal variation in Chinese languages, often referred to as ‘tonal coarticulation’ in the literature. We start by explaining why the term ‘contextual variation’ is preferred to ‘coarticulation’ for tones, before introducing different types of contextual variation observed in Chinese languages. The following processes are covered: assimilatory vs. dissimilatory carryover effects, anticipatory effects, microprosodic effects, and pre-planning effects. Next, three debated issues in Chinese linguistics related to contextual variation are discussed. First, are dynamic tones (e.g., rise, fall) underlyingly dynamic or made up of sequences of static tones (e.g., Low-High)? Second, are tones hosted in the rhyme or across an entire syllable? Third, does the Mandarin neutral tone have an underlying target or is it unspecified? Different views on these issues are presented with suggestions on how some of them may be tested and falsified.

Tone in Chinese languages is distinct in two aspects: (i) the complexity in the tonal make-up and (ii) widespread sandhi. The former is often attributed to underlying complexity in tonal inventories and the latter to triggers immediately adjacent to the sandhi site. Morphosyntax, though highly relevant, is often left unarticulated in the description of tonal inventories and processes. This chapter unravels four major aspects in which morphosyntax condition tonal processes (a) the licensing and/or generation of tonal contours, (b) the neutralization of tone, (c) the triggering and blocking of sandhi; and (d) the impact on tonal prosody. While phonological patterns in other languages are sensitive to the word- and post-lexical levels divide, it is the structural constituency that is often more relevant than syntactic category in Chinese tonal processes. Lest one overstates the power of morphosyntax, note also that morphosyntactic conditioning of tonal processes is likely mediated through alignment and interface with prosody structure. Thus morphosyntax plays not a deterministic role, but a substantially contributive one in the intricacies of tonal processes in Chinese.

Simon Cheung discusses the scholarship surrounding the ‘wisdom psalms’, with an eye towards the varied proposals, as well as the grounds for and development of them over the last century. From this Cheung sets forth his own conception of wisdom psalms. They constitute ‘a family of psalms, with varying degrees of membership, that exhibit a wisdom-oriented constellation of its generic elements’. The core traits are likened to DNA, which can be more or less present, and mainly discerned in theme, tone and intention. ‘Wisdom psalms’, to some degree, then, feature wisdom, carry an ‘intellectual tone’ and a pedagogical intent, all of which Cheung inspects in Psalm 34:8–17. Overall, his approach may offer interpreters additional accuracy when considering wisdom and its influence within the Psalter.

The chapter begins with an overview of current Hausa phonology. It then provides a picture of what existed in ‘Old Hausa’ and the subsequent changes that took place, many due to regular sound laws such as Klingenheben’s Law, the Law of Codas in Reduplication, loss of word-final nasals, and the change of non-initial /r/ into /y/. Although sporadic, historical metathesis was much more common than one usually finds in diachronic change. Glottal stop and /h/ are newly introduced phonemes, resulting from the addition of onsets to vowel-initial words. The high frequency glottalized semivowel /’y/ is also a new phoneme resulting from the fusion of /?/ + /y/. Gemination was originally absent but appeared later and became common through phonological and morphological means. Vowels developed from a skewed 2-3-5 (initial-medial-final) system, with vowel length only distinctive medially, into a system with five vowels, all of which now occur long and short. Starting with two level tones, Hausa later developed Falling and Rising contours, the latter having simplified to High. The loss of vowels resulted in the existence of lexical floating tones not underlyingly attached to segments.

This chapter surveys issues related to the production of tone in the world’s languages. Here the term ‘tone’ refers to the localised (within-syllable) use of fundamental frequency that contrasts lexical meanings (thus excluding pitch accent and stress languages). A comprehensive review of tonal phonetics is presented covering the acoustic correlates of tone, contextual tonal variation, methods used in tone production research, as well as recent research topics in tonal phonetics. We offer suggestions for teaching and learning of tone as a phonetics topic and the chapter concludes with suggestions for future directions for tone production research.

This chapter provides an overview of research on heritage language (HL) sound systems, with a focus on areas of convergence and divergence among heritage speakers (HSs), native speakers (NSs) who continue to be dominant in the language, and second language learners (L2ers) who acquired the language later in life. Drawing on data from a wide range of HLs, the chapter addresses both phonetic (articulatory, acoustic, perceptual) and phonological (phonemic, distributional, phonotactic) aspects of the HL sound system, as well as that of the majority language, in light of theories of bilingual speech and variables previously studied as predictors of HSs’ linguistic behavior. Despite the diversity of results reviewed, several recurring themes emerge, including intermediate patterning between NSs and L2ers, a higher level of performance in perception than production, and individual variability. In particular, the depth and the accessibility of HSs’ knowledge of the HL sound system show considerable variation related to structural linguistic factors, demographic and sociolinguistic factors, input and usage-based factors, and methodological factors. In addition to summarizing the areas in which there is an emerging consensus, the chapter points out a number of remaining questions that pave the way for future research on HL sound systems.

This part of the book demonstrates the many ways in which we can come to understand and enjoy a poem. It takes the reader through a series of shorter sections, each of them showing how by asking a particular question of a poem – about its verbal effects, about its form, about its emotional impact, about its subject matter – we can start to develop an understanding of it. The sections offer accessible introductions to technical matters such as rhyme and metre, but they also show how questions of technique in poetry are inseparable from the questions of what a poem has to say and to show us. Examples from a broad range of poetry written in English are used to illustrate the different approaches.

This chapter discusses some grammatical features of 'African urban youth languages', focusing on Camfranglais in Cameroonian cities such as Yaoundé and Douala. While anti-languages have been characterised as parasitic styles of speaking that graft onto the grammar of another language, developing an ephemeral emblematic lexicon but little or no grammatical structures of their own, Camfranglais stands out in that its grammatical features cannot be entirely reduced to a (Standard) French matrix. Rather, it presents various phonological, morphological and syntactical properties mostly transferred from Cameroonian Pidgin English and its Bantoid substrate languages, most probably via a spectrum of varieties of Cameroonian French. However, as long as the distribution of these features along the continuum Camfranglais–Cameroonian Pidgin English–second-language varieties of French (and English) remains unclear, it cannot be decided whether Camfranglais has indeed developed a hybrid grammar peculiar to itself. On the functional level, Camfranglais retains some typical anti-language characteristics with a tendency to expand as a style of speaking that indexes positive values such as integration, solidarity, progressiveness and a cosmopolitan Cameroonian identity.

This chapter focuses on the lexicogrammatical systems of IMPERATIVE MOOD and INDICATIVE MOOD in the Australian language, Pitjantjatjara, in relation to the discourse-semantic systems of NEGOTIATION, SPEECH FUNCTION, ENGAGEMENT and GRADUATION and the phonological system of TONE. It treats co-selections of features in MOOD and TONE as instantial couplings (Martin 2008) that realise variations in speech function. This discourse-semantic orientation departs from the treatment in Halliday (1967), Halliday & Greaves (2008) and Rose (2001, 2008) of tone/mood relations in terms of grammatical delicacy. Options in NEGOTIATION and SPEECH FUNCTION are illustrated with a series of exchanges that exemplify the coupling of MOOD and TONE selections. Imperative and indicative mood systems are then described in detail and exemplified with mood/tone couplings, including options for metaphors of mood. The chapter concludes by outlining grammatical and phonological realisations of ENGAGEMENT and GRADUATION, including the lexicogrammatical system of MODAL ASSESSMENT.

This chapter provides an introductory overview of the phonological systems used in the languages of mainland Southeast Asia. The chapter begins with an overview of the various systems of consonants and vowels that are found, and the phonotactic principles by which those segments are combined to form syllables. The closely-related phenomena of register and tone are then introduced and defined, followed by an outline of the processes of tonogenesis, by which a language can develop a tone system. The chapter closes with a discussion of further aspects of the area’s sound systems, including tone sandhi, intonation, the prosodic hierarchy and criteria for different notions of ‘word’.

This chapter gives an introductory overview of the strategies for forming words in the languages of mainland Southeast Asia. The chapter begins with a discussion of the form class distinctions that are found, including the categories of noun, verb, adjective, adposition, and adverb. Of the various processes for forming words, the chapter focuses on compounding and reduplication, which are relied upon widely in languages of the area, and affixation, which is a speciality of Austroasiatic languages in particular. The chapter features a section on the uses of tone in word formation, a feature of Hmong-Mien languages. Psycho-collocations are discussed: an area-wide form of compounding involving the mention of body parts to denote emotional and psychological states.

Emotion in close reading is a coil, spring or spiral (labelled Stage V) that comes towards the end of our labyrinthine experience of lines of verse – or so I. A. Richards suggests in the ‘Arcadia’ diagram of Principles of Literary Criticism. For the early practical critics on whom Richards experimented, this coil of feeling was an unfortunate vortex from which little affective intelligence emerged: modernist close reading revealed only inhibitions, sentimentality, stock responses. This chapter explores how practical criticism navigates an unsettling new matrix for understanding the experience of feeling in reading and of ‘tone’ as a critical category. It examines the crisis of affect within literary criticism’s early disciplinary history by focusing on Richards’s understanding of ‘pseudo-statement’ and by tracing his contemporary dialogues (Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot) and later interlocutors, such as Sianne Ngai. The chapter re-considers the figure of the critic as cultural confidence man and challenges the flattening of new-critical ‘tone’ in recent affect theory.

My essay explores how left- and right-wing antihumanist discourses share certain tones. It focuses, in particular, on discourses that understand modernity as a series of dispossessions (especially of community, or of self) and on the critique of the symbol as a form of false consolation.  Across the twentieth century, modernity-narratives blend with critiques of the symbol to create a tone of baleful negativity that runs the political gamut from right to left and that comes to count, in the humanistic academy, as the identifying note of critical theory. My paper will push back against the dominance of the negative tone in critical theory by outlining how advances in our understanding of capitalism have long since left modernity - and demystification-critiques behind, and by demonstrating that contemporary literature, especially poetry, has developed a tremendous tonal range by which to think about political suffering, the experience of “nature,” and the character of symbols.

Chapter 4 examines the tone of presidential discussions of Supreme Court cases, focusing on why presidents discuss cases in positive, negative, and neutral lights. We argue that presidents alter the tone of their remarks about the Court’s decisions in an effort to build public support for their presidencies, shape how the public views the constitutional issues at play, and influence the implementation of the Court’s decisions in the bureaucracy and in Congress. For example, a president happy with the Court’s decision can praise the decision and assure the country that he will take all steps necessary to ensure it is implemented. Conversely, a president displeased with a decision can criticize that decision and encourage Congress to take action to alter or reverse the decision, thus signaling that the fight over the case has not ended. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, we find that presidents criticize cases they disagree with ideologically; those that declare laws unconstitutional; and those decided by minimum winning coalitions. Conversely, presidents tend to praise salient Supreme Court decisions that support their preferred ideological positions.

This chapter outlines the evolution of Englishes outside of the British Isles, with particular attention to exploitation colonies. It looks at contact between the English-speaking and indigenous language communities during Britain’s trade and colonization ventures from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries but also highlights circumstances predating British colonization often overlooked in the field, comprising a larger group of players, in a chain of contact, such as that among various Asian communities, and with the Portuguese. Features such as tone, particles, and mixed codes are discussed; although traditionally regarded as the outcome of imperfect learning, such restructuring illustrates how, with diverse ecologies and typologies, there are no constraints on the typology of the emergent World Englishes (WEs) varieties. Also underscored is the fact that the dynamics and outcomes of contact in WEs are not distinct from those observed in scenarios in which creole languages evolve. The chapter concludes by evaluating the current and future evolution of English from contemporary contact ecologies, including computer-mediated communication, the language teaching industry, and trade.

Expands on aspects of ‘affective sociability’, discussing its relationship to notions of expression, individuality and feeling. I discuss those gentler elements of the aesthetic of the time - simplicity, naturalness, moderation, grace - that have proved stumbling-blocks for later generations of critics, and the way in which they crystallized in the widespread vaunting of the powers of pure melody, discreetly accompanied. Pleasure and politeness are also discussed as parts of this same discursive field. On the other hand, just as fundamental to the music of the time is its ambivalence of tone: the uncertainty about whether a particular musical passage or gesture is to be taken on face value or not. This entails a consideration of various forms of double meaning - whether accounted for as humour, wit, comedy or irony - that are so common in this instrumental repertoire. A corollary of these is a decidedly anti-scholastic, anti-authoritarian orientation in a style that is keen to avoid any perceived pedantry. I then focus on works and movements set in the minor mode, the common critical praise of which is often directed against the sorts of attributes I have considered earlier in the chapter.