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In this article, nominal tonology of Tagbana, a Senufo language of Côte d’Ivoire is investigated. The contribution of this article is twofold as it concerns the whole tonal system, including lexical tones, sandhi tone rules, and the organisation of the prosodic hierarchy. It is shown that Tagbana has three level tones (L, M, H) and two floating tones (H) and (L). A mid tone (M) at the end of a noun is always followed by a floating tone (either H or L), which might be a historic trace left by the tone of a Class Marker. Two clusters of sandhi tonal rules are shown to play a role, called ‘Mid Replacement rules’ (RepM) and ‘Spreading rules on H & L’ (SprH&L). The domains of the sandhi tonal rules are studied in some detail, from the Minimal Prosodic Word (root + class marker), the Intermediate and Maximal Prosodic Words (nominal and adjectival compounds), the Prosodic Phrases (particularly in object + verb constructions), to the Intonational Phrase. Considering the prosodic levels above the Minimal Prosodic Word, more tonal sandhi processes are found to apply in smaller prosodic domains than in larger ones.

This paper establishes the lexical tone contrasts in the Nigerian language Izon, focusing on evidence for floating tone. Many tonal languages show effects of floating tone, though typically in a restricted way, such as occurring with only a minority of morphemes, or restricted to certain grammatical environments. For Izon, the claim here is that all lexical items sponsor floating tone, making it ubiquitous across the lexicon and as common as pre-associated tone. The motivation for floating tone comes from the tonal patterns of morphemes in isolation and within tone groups. Based on these patterns, all lexical morphemes are placed into one of four tone classes defined according to which floating tones they end in. This paper provides extensive empirical support for this analysis and discusses several issues which emerge under ubiquitous floating tone. Issues include the principled allowance of OCP(T) violations, and the propensity for word-initial vowels and low tone to coincide.

Tlapanec (Mè’phàà) is known for its enigmatic tonal alternation in verb forms according to person and aspect-mode categories, in addition to suppletion and other segmental alternations. In this paper, we argue that the tonal alternations observed in Tlapanec regular agentive verbs can be straightforwardly accounted for by phonology, without resorting to any extreme abstractness: the lexical tones of the prefixes and the verb stems, with underspecification and floating tones, and cross-linguistically common tone processes such as tone spreading and floating tone docking. Such a phonological (or a morpheme-based) approach is contrasted with a word-based approach, where tonal alternations are viewed as inflectional classes. We show that the phonological approach is more adequate than a word-based approach.

In this paper, I discuss tonal reduplication in Kunming, which has received little attention in the formal linguistics literature. Based on first hand data, I show that tonal reduplication in Kunming is interesting in two respects. First, a Base tone is not always transferred to the RED (reduplicant); while a Hr (high register) Base tone (i.e., yinping 44, shangsheng 53) is transferred to the RED, the RED corresponding to a Lr (low register) Base tone (i.e., yangping 31, qusheng 11) surfaces with a non-correspondent high tone. I propose that the non-corresponding high tone comes from a floating tone that accompanies reduplication and is only realized on the RED corresponding to Lr Base tones, but not to Hr Base tones, because Hr Base tones are prominent and more easily preserved on the RED. Second, as far as yinping tone sandhi is concerned, though it applies normally on the Base and outside the BR complex, on the RED it unexpectedly underapplies when the RED carries a yinping tone copied from the Base. I propose that tone sandhi underapplies only on a copied yinping tone, and not elsewhere, because only underapplication of yinping tone sandhi in this case can help improve BR Identity.

This paper focuses on the association of floating tones. One type we call "phonological association", where the tone-bearing unit (TBU) the floating tone associates to is determined by the phonological grammar, e.g. to a default position like a stressed syllable or domain edge. We contrast this with another type we call "targeted association", whereby the floating tone targets a numerical position , e.g. a floating H associates to the fourth TBU of the stem. Targeted association is idiosyncratic to the sponsoring morpheme, and does not necessarily target a default position. Such data have been taken as evidence for counting in grammar. Instead, we propose a novel representation we call "phantom structure", without counting. Phantom structure formalizes the observation that certain morphemes require structure to be present in order for their floating tone to be realized, but cannot provide this structure themselves. Under the targeted association type, the floating tone is pre-associated to a specific position in the phantom structure. We show that a simple grammar with two partially overlapping correspondence relations - substantive input and output structure (SubO-CORR) and phantom and output structure (PhO-CORR) - derives the association of the floating tone to the equivalent numerical position in the output as in the phantom plane input.

Complex phenomena of grammatical tone, well-described for many African languages, are increasingly attested also in the Tibeto-Burman family. This paper describes the tone assignment rule and two cases of tonal expression of grammatical categories in the Tibeto-Burman language Anal. The typologically unusual rule involves tone spreading, tonal polarity on a non-edge constituent and additional spreading, resulting in constant tonal patterns across grammatical suffixes. In two different cases the combination of the tonal pattern assigned by this rule with peculiar morpho-tonological processes results in a marking of a grammatical category (future and 1sg-person) by grammatical tone, by vowel-length, or only by the overall tonal pattern of the verbal form. Both cases are related to the omission of an explicit marking of the category, although the outcome cannot be explained only by the concept of a floating tone.

This paper presents an introductory overview of the pronominal system in Bissa Barka, an Eastern Mande language spoken in south-east Burkina Faso and northern Ghana. Primary focus is placed on the tonal behaviour of the pronouns. The paper begins with a discussion of the number of level tones represented in the language, including a summary of past tonal research. Next, it presents the two sets of personal pronouns used in the language. The tonal behaviour of each of the personal pronouns is presented, along with the tonal behaviour of the pronouns in a possessive phrase, and the tonal behaviour of the logophoric pronoun. The paper ends with a discussion of the four tonal processes identified in the pronominal system including a floating H tone, L tone spread, final falling tone and a restriction of L tone followed by a L tone. Cet article présente une introduction au système pronominal du bissa barka, une langue mandé-est parlée au sud-est du Burkina Faso et au nord du Ghana. Il met l’accent sur le comportement tonal des pronoms. L’étude commence par une discussion sur le nombre de tons unis présents dans la langue et un aperçu des travaux antérieurs traitant du ton en bissa. Puis les deux groupes de pronoms personnels bissa barka sont présentés. Le comportement tonal de chaque pronom en fonction sujet est analysé, de même que dans le syntagme génitival ; une attention spéciale est portée au pronom logophorique qui ne se distingue du pronom de 3e personne que par son influence tonale. L’article s’achève par un résumé des quatre phénomènes tonaux identifiés dans le système pronominal : le ton H flottant, la propagation du ton B, la chute du niveau du ton final et la restriction de la combinaison B suivie de B. В статье даётся предварительный обзор местоименной системы биса-барка, языка восточной группы манде, на котором говорят на юго-востоке Буркины Фасо и в северной Гане. Главное внимание уделено тональному поведению местоимений. Обсуждается количество уровневых тонов в языке, даётся обзор предшествующих публикаций на эту тему. Представлены две серии личных местоимений языка биса-барка, рассматривается тональное поведение каждого из местоимений, в том числе в генитивной конструкции; особое внимение уделено логофорическому местоимению. Статья завершается обсуждением четырёх тональных явлений, обнаруженных в прономинальной системе: плавающего высокого тона; продвижения вправо низкого тона; конечного понижения тона; ограничение на низкий тон, за которым следует другой низкий тон.

This paper attempts to account for the impact of noun classes on the change of tones in the associative constructions (ACs) in Fe’efe’e, a lesser described Grassfield language spoken in the West Region of Cameroon. The paper clearly demonstrates that noun classes play a role in tonal changes in associative constructions. It shows that tonal changes observed within the associative construction depend much on the noun class to which the head noun belongs. The paper further brings out the fact that from a structural point of view, the basic associative construction in the language is canonically made up of an associative noun which is the head noun (HN), an associative marker (AM) both segmentally and non-segmentally marked, and an associated noun (AN). In most of the cases, the associative marker is a floating tone cross-linguistically attested in such constructions in most Grassfields and notably Mbam-Nkam languages.

This paper investigates the question of how much work phonology can do in accounting for apparently suppletive but phonologically predictable allomorphy. Two case studies of surface alternations in the domain of morphological tone are discussed and monorepresentational optimality theoretic analyses are proposed that predict the apparent suppletive allomorphies from a single underlying representation for the morphemes in question.

Author(s): Rolle, Nicholas Revett | Advisor(s): Hyman, Larry M.; Inkelas, Sharon | Abstract: The topic of this study is grammatical tone (GT), which I define as a tonological operation that is not general across the phonological grammar, and is restricted to the context of a specific morpheme or construction, or a natural class of morphemes or constructions. In typologizing grammatical tone, I frame it in terms of dominance effects (Kiparsky a Halle 1977, Kiparsky 1984, Inkelas 1998), and divide GT into two types. Dominant GT systemically deletes the underlying tone of the target (with or without revaluation by a grammatical tune), while non-dominant GT does not systemically delete it. From a cross-linguistic survey of GT, I develop a typological principle called the dominant GT asymmetry, which states that within a multi-morphemic constituent, the dominant trigger is a dependent (e.g. a modifier of affix), and the target is a lexical head or a dependent structurally closer to the lexical head. In this way, dominance is always directed ‘inward’ within morphological hierarchical structure, supporting earlier statements such as Alderete’s (2001a, 2001b) ‘Strict Base Mutation’. For any theoretical model of dominant vs. non-dominant GT, I show there are three problems that must be addressed: the origin problem (where does the grammatical tune come from), the erasure problem (why do the underlying tones of the target go unrealized), and the scope problem (what determines where the grammatical tune docks, i.e. its scope). To this end, I develop a novel model which I call Matrix-Basemap Correspondence (an extension of Output-Output Correspondence - Benua 1997) and combine it with Cophonology Theory (Inkelas a Zoll 2007). Under this theory, the origin problem is attributed to floating tones which are part of the underlying representation of the trigger. A major claim is that there is no representational difference between dominant and non-dominant tone: they both involve floating tonemes undocked to a TBU in the input. I implement my model within Distributed Morphology (Halle a Marantz 1993), whereby triggers of dominant GT are not constructions (as in classic Cophonology Theory – Inkelas 1998), but rather individual vocabulary items (following Sande a Jenks 2017). Dominant triggers have a special cophonology which ranks a constraint enforcing dominance higher than default constraints. This dominant constraint should be understood as a special type of faithfulness: correspondence between a matrix derivation and an abstract basemap consisting of only unvalued tone bearing units, e.g. an input-output basemap //ⒽⓁ + ττ//  \ττ\. It is to this basemap output that the matrix output must be faithful in tonal shape, resulting in the target’s underlying tone going unrealized (addressing the erasure problem). The central insight here is that dominant GT should be characterized as a special type of paradigm uniformity effect, a hypothesis referred to as dominance as transparadigmatic uniformity. In this way I derive dominance as faithfulness and not as markedness (Inkelas 1998) or a special construction constraint (McPherson a Heath 2016).Finally, to address the scope problem I develop a theory in which syntactic structure is mapped to a hierarchical morpho-phonological tree via an operation at spell-out called hierarchy exchange. Within instances of dominant GT, a mother node in the morpho-phonological tree consists of the trigger of the grammatical tune (one daughter) and the target (the other daughter). The cophonology of the trigger scopes over the entire sequence, with cophonologies applying cyclically at each node resulting in ‘layers’ of grammatical tone. One advantage of Cophonology Theory is that it is intrinsically cyclic and thus captures the fact that dominance is always inward without stipulation.A major component of this model is that hierarchy exchange preserves the inside-out derivational history of the syntactic module by referencing asymmetrical c-command. In this way, I conclude that syntax/phonology interface models which appeal to c-command are essentially correct, the most relevant being McPherson (2014) and McPherson a Heath (2016) which derive dominant GT scope via c-command. However, the model proposed in this study differs from them by having only indirect reference to c-command, mediated by hierarchy exchange. I conclude that the real legacy of c-command may not be linearization (as in Kayne 1994), but rather is in delimiting the scope of morphologically-triggered phonological operations. In short, I posit a model which includes (i) floating tone representation, (ii) output-output correspondence (with abstract basemap induction), (iii) spell-out operations which apply in parallel, (iv) cyclicity within the morpho-phonological module, (v) indirect reference to syntactic structure and syntactic relations (e.g. c-command), and (vi) cophonologies triggered by DM vocabulary items. By combining disparate models and expanding on others, we arrive at a novel account of grammatical tone with extensive empirical coverage.

This thesis provides a corpus‐based description of Kakabe, a Mande language spoken in Guinea, with a focus on phonology. It consists of a short grammatical sketch and two parts dedicated to the analysis of the segmental and the suprasegmental phonology. Segmental phonological processes can be conditioned by metrical constraints, the ban on hiatus, prosodic phrasing and morphological context. Vowel deletion and vowel assimilation which serve to resolve hiatus, apply clause‐internally, as well as across clause boundaries. I also describe various strategies of loanword adaptation used in Kakabe, such as vowel epenthesis and consonant cluster simplification. Kakabe is a terraced‐level tone language (H vs. L), featuring downdrift, downstep, H raising, floating L, and a number of tonal processes, such as OCP style H‐insertion between two L domains, tone spread and leveling of HLH contour. As a result, the distance between the underlying lexical tones and their surface realization can be rather important. Each tonal process is applied within one particular prosodic unit. Therefore, tonal processes participate in phrasing the speech into prosodic units.Kakabe uses a number of boundary tones to signal illocutionary force of the utterance. Lexical tones and boundary tones coexists with intonational operations on the F0 curve. Intonational tone raising is associated with the H% and HL% boundary tones. Apart from that, it affects polarity items, the universal quantifier, and other pragmatically prominent lexemes, such as ideophones and intensifiers. The appendices include a Kakabe‐French dictionary, comprising 3400 entries, and an oral corpus of 12 hours of various genres, transcribed, glossed and time‐aligned with audio and video.; Cette thèse fournit une description du kakabé, une langue mandée parlée en Guinée, basée sur un corpus et avec un focus sur le système phonologique. Elle contient une brève esquisse grammaticale et deux parties qui portent sur l'analyse phonologique : la phonologie segmentale et la phonologie suprasegmentale. Les processus concernant les segments phonologiques peuvent être conditionnés par des contraintes métriques, par l'interdiction du hiatus, par le découpage de l’énoncé en phrases prosodiques et par le contexte morphologique. Le kakabé applique diversesstratégies d'adaptation des emprunts (principalement, du poular et du français), telles que l'épenthèse vocalique, la simplification d’agglomérations consonantiques. Le kakabé est une langue à ton (H vs. L), avec downdrift, relèvement du ton H, un ton flottant L, et un certain nombre de processus tonals, tels que l'insertion du ton H, la propagation du ton, l'aplatissement du contour HLH. En conséquence, la distance entre les tons lexicaux sous‐jacents et leur réalisation de surface peut être assez importante. Chacun des processus tonals est appliqué dans une unité prosodique particulière.Par conséquent, les processus tonals participent au découpage du discours en unités prosodiques. Le kakabé comporte des tons de frontière qui servent à signaler la force illocutoire de l'énoncé. Les tons lexicaux et les tons de frontière coexistent avec des opérations intonatives sur la courbe F0. Les appendices comprennent un dictionnaire kakabé-français, composé de 3400 entrées, et le corpus de 12 heures de textes en kakabé, transcrits, glosés, traduits et accompagnés des fichiers vidéos et audios.