zompist bboard

Posted: **Thu Jun 02, 2011 12:58 pm**

The title is badly phrased, but my question is basically: Are there examples of languages that use tone to mark grammatical features rather than acting as phonemes? I know phonemes is the wrong word, but I'm not sure how to ask if tone can be used for marking case and inflecting verbs, rather than how it seems to work in (say) chinese (also understanding I have a fifteen minutes on Wikipedia understanding of Chinese.)

It seems that 'floating tones' seem to cover what I'm thinking about, but they seem to occur in languages that use tones for phonological means as well.

Posted: **Thu Jun 02, 2011 1:02 pm**

yeah, but I can't tell you off the top of my head what they are. African probably. The tones in East Asia tend to be lexical, though, you're right.

Posted: **Thu Jun 02, 2011 1:08 pm**

I think that that would be grammatical tone, as opposed to lexical tone, which suggests a contrast of some sort. I know very little about tone, though, so you might want that information seconded.

Posted: **Thu Jun 02, 2011 1:52 pm**

Maasai language is one, I think.

Posted: **Thu Jun 02, 2011 2:32 pm**

Niger-Congo languages (according to the brief blowthrough I did yesterday) tend to use both grammatical and lexical tone; the more tones, the more they're used for lexical distinctions. But of course there's always exceptions. I came up with a half-baked theory in the last 5 minutes: that previous families there had lexical tones, while the 'original' Niger-Congo stock (if it indeed existed, apparently that isn't totally secure according to some, which could make sense given it was another one of Greenberg's eyeball throw'em-togethers which are hit or miss) had mostly grammatical tone.

Posted: **Thu Jun 02, 2011 6:52 pm**

You might want to look at Somali. I know it distinguishes gender by tone (well, pitch accent), so it probably has some other things going on with grammatical tone.

There's also this.

Posted: **Thu Jun 02, 2011 7:23 pm**

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mande_languages are known for this. Practically zero info on Wikipedia, though, so youd have to search harder. Maybe Wycoval would have some info but I think maybe the links about grammatical tone in general would be the best place to start.

Posted: **Thu Jun 02, 2011 7:42 pm**

Soap wrote:Maybe Wycoval would have some info

Wycoval's not come here anymore for 2 years or more, though.

Posted: **Thu Jun 02, 2011 10:16 pm**

Kai_DaiGoji wrote:The title is badly phrased, but my question is basically: Are there examples of languages that use tone to mark grammatical features rather than acting as phonemes? I know phonemes is the wrong word, but I'm not sure how to ask if tone can be used for marking case and inflecting verbs, rather than how it seems to work in (say) chinese (also understanding I have a fifteen minutes on Wikipedia understanding of Chinese.)

It happens in Chinese but not in Mandarin. (EDIT: Wait, does dōngxī "east and west" vs. dōngxi "thing(s)" count for something?) Ripped off from the cantonese.sheik.co.uk forum:

C Chiu wrote:Thirdly, tone modification also occurs for grammatical purposes. For many verbs and a few adjectives and classifiers, a modification to Tone 2 would also change the words into nouns. Examples: 話 /wa6*2/ ("tell" becomes "words"), 掃 /sou3*2/ ("broom" becomes "sweep"), 架 /ga3*2/ ("erect" becomes "shelf").

(Source: this thread. The asterisk is used in Cantonese linguistics to indicate sandhi, interpret it as equivalent to an arrow e.g. /wa6*2/ as [wa:˨˨] -> [wa:˧˥].)

Also, in learnèd Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciations for reading Literary Chinese, there's some words' pronunciations that change tone according to their function, especially if the word is acting as a causative or transitive verb (IIRC).

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 7:07 am**

Guitarplayer wrote:
Soap wrote:Maybe Wycoval would have some info
Wycoval's not come here anymore for 2 years or more, though.

A sad loss. Anyone know what happened to him or was it just an Internet Dropout?

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 8:15 am**

Drydic Guy wrote:A sad loss. Anyone know what happened to him or was it just an Internet Dropout?

http://zbb.spinnwebe.com/memberlist.php ... file&u=670 — He's got a GooglePages account, so maybe he also uses GMail with that user name? Might be a way to contact him.

Posted: **Sun Jun 05, 2011 7:15 pm**

Guitarplayer wrote:
Soap wrote:Maybe Wycoval would have some info
Wycoval's not come here anymore for 2 years or more, though.

She hasn't? What a shame...

Posted: **Sun Jun 05, 2011 7:58 pm**

I think Oto-Manguan languages do this, you could check up on them.

Posted: **Sun Jun 05, 2011 9:16 pm**

Aiďos wrote:
Guitarplayer wrote:
Soap wrote:Maybe Wycoval would have some info
Wycoval's not come here anymore for 2 years or more, though.
She hasn't? What a shame...

He, actually.

Posted: **Sun Jun 05, 2011 11:31 pm**

I think Serbo-Croat. has this, but I'm not really sure how pitch accent works. I think <u grad> (in the city/to the city) is in a different case depending on the tone, vs. [u~grad] (not sure of the notation either) or something.

Posted: **Mon Jun 06, 2011 5:55 am**

Beli Orao wrote:I think Serbo-Croat. has this, but I'm not really sure how pitch accent works. I think <u grad> (in the city/to the city) is in a different case depending on the tone, vs. [u~grad] (not sure of the notation either) or something.

Something similar works in Slovene as well... I'm sure there's at least some research on pitch accent in South Slavic languages somewhere. The problem is that most native speakers, at least in Slovenia, don't notice it or perceive it as phonemic at all, and actual minimal pairs are rare to nonexistent due to the simultaneous presence additional suffixes, word order, syntactic markers etc. - plus it's virtually never marked in orthography. One alleged example in Slovene is mačka 'female cat' vs. mačka 'two male cats' vs. mačka 'male cat (gen.)'... but I've no idea which of the meanings are distinguished, or even how. It's supposed to be low vs. high pitch or something, but I've no idea on the specifics. If I attempt to pronounce the words and record myself, it may look pretty clear at first, but if I follow it with another 'blind test', my evaluations are usually exactly the opposite.

In any case, it's difficult to impossible to tell in actual discourse since it's virtually never ambiguous.

Posted: **Tue Jun 07, 2011 12:30 am**

Eddy wrote:
Aiďos wrote:
Guitarplayer wrote:
Soap wrote:Maybe Wycoval would have some info
Wycoval's not come here anymore for 2 years or more, though.
She hasn't? What a shame...
He, actually.

Well ignore the "s" then, I tend to refer to an unknown person in the feminine.

Posted: **Wed Jun 15, 2011 1:10 pm**

According to Wikipedia:

"As in many Nilotic languages, Datooga case is marked by tone. The absolutive case has the unpredictable tone of the citation form of the noun, whereas the nominative is marked by a characteristic tone which obliterates this lexical tone."

Nilotic languages include Massai, which someone already mentioned. If you're willing to pay a bit, there's a whole scholarly journal article about it

Posted: **Sun Jun 19, 2011 7:33 pm**

Kai_DaiGoji wrote:The title is badly phrased, but my question is basically: Are there examples of languages that use tone to mark grammatical features rather than acting as phonemes? I know phonemes is the wrong word, but I'm not sure how to ask if tone can be used for marking case and inflecting verbs, rather than how it seems to work in (say) chinese (also understanding I have a fifteen minutes on Wikipedia understanding of Chinese.)

It seems that 'floating tones' seem to cover what I'm thinking about, but they seem to occur in languages that use tones for phonological means as well.

Yes, this happens in many languages. However, you seem to be a little confused about what it means for something to be "phonological" or "grammatical".

In Spanish, we can make the claim that /a/ marks feminine gender and /o/ marks masculine gender. This is widespread throughout the language: esposo "husband", esposa "wife". We can call this "grammatical", but it is at the same time a phonological feature. Why? Because I just established a minimal pair. The difference is realized in sounds, and is relevant to the language's phonology.

We can imagine the same situation with tones (or other suprasegmental features). In Thok Reel, a Western Nilotic language spoken in Southern Sudan, the word for "husband" is cɔw, with a high tone for singular and a low tone for plural. Sure, the relevant morphemes here are tones, but that doesn't mean the tones are not phonological. Any sound distinction in a language is phonological.*

* This is an untrue generalization but it's true enough for the purposes of this thread and the understanding of the OP, in my opinion. If we want to have a deeper discussion of the differences between phonetics and phonology and how the two interact, let's do that in a different thread.

Posted: **Sun Jun 19, 2011 7:49 pm**

I missed that bit... but yeah, what you missed is that I think OP is looking for the distinction between using tone for grammatical distinctions and lexical distinctions – essentially, a question of morphology rather than phonology.

Any language that uses tones uses them phonologically, since they're sounds. yup.

(Arguably that's all languages, but again, that's another question.)

Posted: **Fri Jul 26, 2013 2:47 pm**

Nortaneous wrote:You might want to look at Somali. I know it distinguishes gender by tone (well, pitch accent), so it probably has some other things going on with grammatical tone.

Some time ago I came across a great page on "Somali Noun Morphophonology".

Posted: **Fri Jul 26, 2013 2:51 pm**

Drydic Guy wrote:Niger-Congo languages (according to the brief blowthrough I did yesterday) tend to use both grammatical and lexical tone[.]

This is the case in Kinyarwanda, an important and underrated Bantu language. I'll hand the microphone over to the late and lamented linguist Alexandre Kimenyi to explain how his native tongue employs lexical, grammatical, and syntactic tone.

zompist bboard

Tone as grammatical marker rather than phonological

Tone as grammatical marker rather than phonological

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Re: Tone as grammatical marker rather than phonological