East Asian Linguistics Workshop: "Tone Sandhi Patterns in Khatso", Dr. Chris Donlay

Linguists have a general understanding of the typology of tone systems around the world, but there is no such framework for tone sandhi. East Asian languages, which tend to have more elaborate toneme inventories, usually exhibit some sort of sandhi pattern. They are generally considered to be purely phonological processes, and many of the patterns seem to be motivated by adjacency avoidance, such as the well-known Tone 3 sandhi pattern in Mandarin. However, the unusual tone sandhi patterns in Khatso [kha55tso3 喀桌语], an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Yunnan, China, cannot be explained by phonology alone. Khatso has eight contour tones and there are a handful of unrelated sandhi patterns; none are widespread. Instead, they mostly occur in particular constructions for specific syntactic and pragmatic purposes. Using a discourse-functional approach, this talk explores Khatso sandhi and what it may mean for a typology of tone sandhi in East Asian languages.

Dr. Chris Donlay is a linguist interested in the language structure found in everyday speech and how these structures compare cross-linguistically. He uses this approach to document endangered languages and has ongoing projects in China and Pakistan. He holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara and teaches at San Jose State University.