Xiaonong Zhu

ABSTRACT: This paper provides a systematic account of tonogenesis. The emergence of tone is a process of pitch upgrading from an accompanying feature of phonation types to a distinctive feature. It involves three linguistic processes: Various phonation types, clear, breathy, falsetto, etc., which intrinsically induce pitch differences; sonorous mono-syllabic morpheme structure that enhances the pitch differences; and phonologization, which conceptualizes the enhanced pitch differences to a phonological category, tone. A flowchart is designed to show how the preconditions lead to different phono-morphological types of the world’s languages and finally output tone, and its later development. Furthermore, the geographic distributions and ecological constraints of non-modal voices and tone are explored.