Cathryn Yang
List of John Benjamins publications in which Cathryn Yang is involved.
2022 The phonetic tone change *high > rising: Evidence from the Ngwi dialect laboratory Diachronica 39:2, pp. 226–267 | Article
Previous research has proposed a direct path from consonantal effects on F0 to the development of a rising tone value. However, findings from tone change studies in Asian languages suggest an additional pathway to rising: a high tone (i.e., with a tonal target in the upper pitch range) may… read more
2019 Crosslinguistic trends in tone change: A review of tone change studies in East and Southeast Asia Diachronica 36:3, pp. 417–459 | Article
Ground-breaking studies on how Bangkok Thai tones have changed over the past 100 years (Pittayaporn 2007, 2018; Zhu et al. 2015) reveal a pattern that Zhu et al. (2015) term the “clockwise tone shift cycle:” low > falling > high level or rising-falling > rising > falling-rising or low. The… read more
2019 Variation in the tonal space of Yangliu Lalo, an endangered language of Yunnan, China Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 42:1, pp. 2–37 | Article
Endangered tone languages are not often studied within quantitative variationist approaches, but such approaches can provide valuable insights for language description and documentation in the Tibeto-Burman area. This study examines tone variation within Yangliu Lalo (Central Ngwi), a minority… read more
2015 A sociotonetic study of Lalo tone split in progress Asia-Pacific Language Variation 1:1, pp. 52–77 | Article
Since Labov’s early work (e.g., 1963, 1966), sociolinguists have frequently examined change in progress on the segmental level, but much less is known about tone change in progress. The present study finds evidence of a tone split in progress in Lalo, a Tibeto-Burman language of China. While many… read more