The critical aim of this dissertation is to show the lack of explanatory value of typological generalizations in generative research paradigms, and the constructive aim is to propose an alternative conception of typology which gives a justifiable place to typological facts. My contention is that we cannot conclude that the human language faculty (HLF) lacks the means to generate a linguistic phenomenon from only the lack of such a phenomenon in the languages of the world. The temptation to do so arises from equivocation regarding the term Language as used within different generative paradigms: the classical generative paradigm, and the generative-parametric paradigm. The former characterizes Language, understood as HLF, the mental object which allows us to produce and understand languages. For the latter, however, Language also includes the distribution of linguistic structures in the world. HLF is a natural kind; the distribution of linguistic structures in the world is not. Equivocation of the term ‘Language’; occurs when one notion is exchanged for the other within an argument. The problem: only natural kinds support induction. The goal of characterizing HLF is discovering what is necessarily true of HLF. The distribution of linguistic phenomena in the world, although constrained by what HLF allows us to acquire, is also constrained by historical contingency. Generalizations based on these accidental factors are valueless in characterizing HLF: I show this in two case studies, which deal with syllable structure and verbal morpheme order. I argue that the study of the distribution of linguistic phenomena in the world is a historical science, which requires a different set of assumptions than an experimental science such as the classical generative paradigm. The alternative I offer is called ideal-typology. Ideal-typology replaces inductive inference based on natural kinds with pragmatic explanation based on ‘ideal-types’. Ideal-types are convenient fictions, purpose-built to manipulate our cognitive systems into understanding the diversity of historical-scientific data. I illustrate the practice of ideal-typology by showing how the diversity of Chinese tone systems can be measured and organized by the use of ideal-types. Beyond increasing understanding of the data themselves, ideal-typology yields hypotheses that experimental sciences can test.

Inspired by Lin and Huang’s (2009) rhythmic study of Chinese dialects, this study examines speech rhythm of 21 Chinese dialects from three perspectives, timing, melody, and phonological structure. The 21 dialects belong to four major groups of Chinese and their respective sub-groups. The four major groups are Mandarin, Wu, Min, and Cantonese. Nine duration-based and four pitch-based metrics are used to quantify timing and melody, respectively. Four phonological structure-based metrics are used to explore the relationships between syllable structure and timing and between tone structure and melody. All the metrics are paired up according to five categories, duration-only, pitch-only, duration-pitch, duration-syllable, pitch-tone, and each pair is subject to a correlation analysis. Then timing and melody patterns of the Chinese dialects are determined by correlation patterns of relevant metric pairs. The main findings of this study are as follows: 1) Timing and melody patterns of the Chinese dialects are far from homogenous across major groups and melody patterns are more distinct than timing patterns; 2) No single metric pair is able to quantify speech rhythm consistently for all the Chinese dialects; nonetheless, pitch-based metric pairs fare better than duration-based ones; 3) Syllable-timedness and melodiousness are correlated positively for all the major groups except for Wu; 4) Phonological structure plays little role in shaping timing and melody patterns of most Chinese dialects. The above findings are both expected and unexpected. They are expected in the sense that rhythmic perception invovles multiple acoustic cues, so it comes as no surprise that not all rhythmic metrics are successful in quantifying Chinese rhythm. They are unexpected for the reason that all the metrics are developed based more or less on phonological structure, yet the rhythmic patterns they reveal do not correspond to the structure affinity or group membership of the Chinese dialects. Overall, the findings suggest that pitch is a more import cue than duration to Chinese rhythm. As the first study of Chinese rhythm across multiple dialects and from different perspectives, this study not only lays a methodological foundation for future research but also contributes to our in-depth understanding of Chinese dialects. / Graduate / 0290 / yali@uvic.ca