Tone patterns in Mandarin

In January I got my hands on a book called 《现代汉语声调结构词汇》or “Modern Chinese Tone Composition Vocabulary”. This book is unique in that it organises words by their tone patterns rather than their spelling. It also has some handy statistics at the back, gleaned from the words contained within.

There are three main sections in the book. The first and largest (431 pages) contains examples of disyllabic words for all 20 possible tone combinations. That is 4 possible tones for the first syllable and 5 possible tones for the second with the inclusion of the neutral tone or 轻声. Most words in Chinese are disyllabic, by some estimates as many as 65%

The next section contains 3 character words and phrases. Although there are 5 times as many possible combinations of tones (4 first syllable, then 5 each for second and third syllable), there are not as many vocabulary items in this section, which only takes up just over 100 pages. 

The last section contains 4 character words and phrases and, although adding another character gives 5 times as many combinations as the previous section, only takes up about 120 pages. This is partly because of the 500 possible tone combinations, 171 don’t have any entries. Looking through the statistics later on, I found that every one of these 171 combinations contained at least one neutral tone.