It has been said several times that tone is carried by the tonic syllable, and it is now necessary to examine this statement more carefully. Before doing this, another general statement will be made (and will also need further explanation): intonation is carried by the tone-unit.

In a one-syllable utterance, the single syllable must have one of the five tones. In a tone-unit of more than one syllable, the tonic syllable must have one of those tones. If the tonic syllable is the final syllable, the tone will not sound much different from that of a corresponding one-syllable tone-unit. For example, the word 'here' will be said in much the same way in the following two utterances:

/here 'shall we 'sit /here

However, if there are other syllables following the tonic syllable (i.e. there is a tail), we find that the pitch movement of the tone is not completed on the tonic syllable. If a tail follows a tonic syllable that has a rising tone, it will almost always be found that the syllable or syllables of the tail will continue to move upwards from the pitch of the tonic syllable. For example, if the word 'what' is said on a rising tone, '/what' it might have a pitch movement that could be diagrammed like this:

The four syllables in '/what did you say' might be said like this:

with the pitch of the syllables in the tail getting progressively higher. In such cases, the tonic syllable is the syllable on which the pitch movement of the tone begins, but that pitch movement is completed over the rest of the tone-unit (i.e. the tail). If, in rising progressively higher, the pitch reaches the highest part of the speaker's normal pitch range, subsequent syllables will continue at that top level.

We find a similar situation with the falling tone. On a single syllable 'why', the pitch movement might be of this sort:

but if there are syllables following, the fall may not be completed on the tonic syllable:

why did you -go

Again, if the speaker's lowest pitch is reached before the end of the tail, the pitch continues at the bottom level. In the case of a level tone, syllables following in the tail will continue at the same level; since level tone is to be treated as a rather unusual type of tone, we will not examine it in more detail at this stage. The situation is more complicated when we have a tail following a fall-rise or a rise-fall.