Download or read book The Structure of Tone written by Zhiming Bao and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-05-20 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues a fresh theory about the structure of tone. Bao investigates a wide range of tone sandhi data from various Chinese dialects and other Asian tone languages, providing empirical support for his proposal that tone is a formal entity which consists of register and contour. Bao establishes a clear typological distinction between register tone languages and contour tone languages whose contour tones have a more complex structure.