Abstract
The thesis probes into the phenomena of falling-rising tone and glottal stop addition through the diminutive of Jin dialects. Tone is an important feature of Chines languages. The Tonal system has been chronically studied by scholars. But the origin of tone is still controversial. The two marked features: falling-rising tone and glottal stop addition’s origins are rarely described by scholars, too. We argue that the cause of glottal stop addition has a big relevance with diminutive. It also means the “morphological conditioning” plays a very important role on the phenomena. The forming process goes: 1. The word align with the diminutive affix; 2. The combination of two tones (The word anddiminutive affix) stretches the vowel and changes the tone. The place between falling and rising tones generates the room for glottal stop to embed. 3. The glottal is embedded between the place of falling and rising tones cause the tone such as [2ʔ13]. 4. Due to the place of glottal stop does not accord with the Chines syllable structures. It forces glottal stop move to word’s suffix: [213ʔ]. It shows how glottal stop addition comes from as we seen now day also explains the cause of falling-rising tone. The Mandarin’s [214] can be explained as well by the above process. The diminutive in the framework of the grammaticalization cycle (Tsao, 2006) also satisfies the above process.