Speaker
Dr. Cathryn Yang
Payap University
Cathryn Yang is a faculty member of the Linguistics Department at Payap University in Chiang Mai, Thailand, which she joined in 2021. She completed her PhD in linguistics in 2011 at La Trobe University, Australia, under the supervision of David Bradley. Her research focuses on the diachronic development of tone systems, with an areal focus on the languages of East and Southeast Asia. Much of her early work examined tone variation and change in Ngwi (Loloish, Tibeto-Burman) languages including Lalo, Lahu, and Nisu. More recently, Dr. Yang’s work bridges dialectology, sociophonetics, and diachronic phonological typology to identify recurring patterns of tone change and explore the phonetic and systemic biases that shape these crosslinguistic trends. Her work has appeared in Diachronica, Linguistics Vanguard, and Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area among others. She is also a research affiliate of the ERC-funded EVOTONE project (The Emergence and Evolution of Linguistic Tong, PI: James Kirby).

Event Details
Complex contour tones, such as fall-rise and rise-fall, are typologically rare yet prominent in the languages of East and Southeast Asia. How do such contours emerge diachronically?
Drawing on two crosslinguistic surveys, I argue that retiming of tone gestures is a key mechanism in complex contour emergence. The first survey reviews diachronic tone changes in 66 languages from five language families, identifying recurrent pathways through which complex contours emerge. The second survey reviews tonal coarticulation studies from 55 East and Southeast Asian languages, identifying synchronic processes in connected speech that result in complex contour variants.
Findings from the two studies show remarkable consistency: low rising is the most common source of fall-rise, and high falling is the most common source of rise-fall, both synchronically and diachronically, across language families. Furthermore, both anticipatory dissimilation and carryover assimilation tend to result in later alignment of the f0 inflection point in low rising and high falling, thus making their surface trajectories more similar to fall-rise and rise-fall, respectively. Taken together, these findings suggest that complex contours emerge from simple contours through gestural retiming. I discuss the implications of these findings for the diachronic typology of tonal evolution.

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