Falsetto phonation was applied to produce Shangsheng/Rising Tone in the early stage of Chinese tonal development (ca. 400-700 AD) and this phonation type is still in use in the tonal systems of several major Chinese dialect-groups now. In Hubei province, falsetto tones are found in three cities, Songzi, Jingmen and Jianli. In the tonal systems of these three dialects, the tone values show some noteworthy correspondences. In order to present the contemporary state of the falsetto tones and explore the tonal evolution through the synchronic field data, we conducted this research and chose Songzi as our starting point. Based on Evolutionary Phonology and the Multi-Register and Four-Level Tonal Model, three geographically connected and phonologically related dialects are found in Songzi: Weishui Type in the south, Nanhai Type in the middle, and Songzihe Type in the north. They share almost identical onset and rime systems, and their tonal systems are different but related. Weishui maintains a Rusheng/Entering Tone in falsetto or fortis voice and there are five tones in its tonal system; Rusheng has disappeared in Nanhai and four tones remain which are the same as their counterparts in Weishui; there is no Rusheng in Songzihe either, and it shares Yangping/Low Level Tone and Shangsheng with Weishui and Nanhai, but the tone values of its Yinping/High Level Tone and Qusheng/Departing Tone are involved in a tonal flip-flop with their counterparts of the other two dialects. These three synchronic tonal systems show a diachronic chain shift. At present, the Weishui's Rusheng which is in falsetto or fortis voice is moving down in two ways: an overall falling (the pitch falls while the contour maintains), and the lowering of the tone tail. These findings offer us the chance to detect the initial changes in the chain shift of these three tonal systems and evaluate their impact to the phonological systems. [Remark by ISCA Archive: Chinese characters were omitted in the HTML version of this abstract. To view them, please refer to the full paper.]

Index Terms: falsetto, tone, phonation type, evolutionary phonology, the Multi-Register and Four-Level Tonal Model