Abstract
Traditionally, citatition tones have been taken as the basic or underlying tones while sandhi tones are considered derived. Some recent studies have suggested the possibility of the sandhi tone as the basic tone. This paper re-examines the issue in the broader context of grammar. It shows that the contrast-preserving sandhi tones, which have been used as evidence for their basic status, are distributionally restricted along morphosyntactic lines. Based on this observation, the paper argues for a modular analysis, which allows both the citation tone and the sandhi tone to be basic in different grammatical contexts. A stronger hypothesis, which restricts the basic sandhi tones to the lexical domain, has been put forward for future research.
Keywords
citation tone, sandhi tone, modular, historical tonal categories, dialect
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