This book is a comprehensive study on the phonetic characteristics of citation tones in Chaoshan Chinese. It presents the tonal patterns of 65 localities in the Chaoshan area under the “multiple-register and four-level” tonal model. Three case studies are conducted to delve into the evolutionary paths of Chaoshan tones. This book not only provides a large-scale typological study on Chaoshan Chinese, but also offers a good example of how to figure out the evolutionary paths of tones from the perspective of variation. The natural alliance of phonetics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and dialect geography is reinforced. It is also suggested in this book that the joint use of these four disciplines is very promising for the study of Chinese.

Tone: A Linguistic Survey is a nine-chapter text that considers the phonetics and phonology of tone from both a synchronic and a diachronic point of view. The first chapters deal with the physiological and perceptual correlations of tone. These chapters also describe the interactions of tonal and nontonal features. The succeeding chapters provide the phonetic basis for phonological tonal phenomena. These topics are followed by discussions of the physical and physiological aspects of tone, the number of possible contrastive tones in a language, and a suprasegmental representation of tones based on linguistic evidence. This text also summarizes the kinds of tone rules found in languages and the important syntactic function played by tone in a number of the world's languages, particularly those in Africa. The final chapters look into the general and specific principles that constrain historical tone change. This book will prove useful to students with phonology course.

This book investigates the diachronic change of the tone sandhi of Southern Min Chinese, which is known for its synchronic arbitrariness and opacity. It argues that in final-prominent tone sandhi, the change of final tones and the change of non-final tones can be highly independent and essentially different from each other. Accordingly, it proposes a new position-based diachronic approach to study the separate evolution of tones occurring at different positions. This book is the first study to rigorously and systematically explore the diachrony of Southern Min tone sandhi.

Stylistics has become the most common name for a discipline which at various times has been termed 'literary linguistics', 'rhetoric', 'poetics', 'literary philology' and 'close textual reading'. This Handbook is the definitive account of the field, drawing on linguistics and related subject areas such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, educational pedagogy, computational methods, literary criticism and critical theory. Placing stylistics in its intellectual and international context, each chapter includes a detailed illustrative example and case study of stylistic practice, with arguments and methods open to examination, replication and constructive critical discussion. As an accessible guide to the theory and practice of stylistics, it will equip the reader with a clear understanding of the ethos and principles of the discipline, as well as with the capacity and confidence to engage in stylistic analysis.