Tone and Inflection

New Facts and New Perspectives

Enrique L. Palancar, Jean Léo Léonard

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783110450026
• eBook ISBN: 9783110450361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Tone is about melody and meaning, inflection is about grammar, and this book is about a bit of both. The contributions to this volume study possible and sometimes complex ways in which the tones of a language engage in the expression of grammatical categories. There is a widespread conception that tone is a lexical phenomenon only. This is partly a consequence of the main interest in tone coming from phonology, while the main interest in inflection has stemmed from segmental morphology. Similarly, textbooks on inflection and textbooks on tone give very few examples of the inflectional use of tone, and such examples are often the same ones or too similar.

This volume aims to broaden our understanding of the link between tone and inflection by showing that there is more to tone than meets the eye. The book includes general chapters as well as case studies on lesser known languages of Asia, Africa and Papua New Guinea, with a special focus on the Oto-Manguean languages, a large and diverse linguistic stock of Mexico that inspired Kenneth Pike's 1948 seminal work on tone. Most of the contributions to this volume provide first-hand data from recent fieldwork that stems from important language documentation activities.

Enrique L. Palancar and Jean Léo Léonard

1Tone and inflection: An introduction

Tone is about melody and meaning, inflection is about grammar, and this book is about a bit of both. The contributions to this volume study possible and sometimes very complex ways in which the melodies of a given language engage in the expression of grammatical meaning. The volume aims to broaden our understanding of the role of tone in the making of grammar. We believe that this is important because it challenges a widespread conception of tone as being a lexical phenomenon only. Such a conception flows from the expectation that any typical tone language should be like Mandarin Chinese or Vietnamese, but these are languages with little or no inflectional morphology. The contributions to this volume challenge this view by showing that there is much more to tone than meets the eye.

In this light, we wonder if tone, more specifically inflectional tone, is the last frontier in descriptive and typological linguistics. Evanescent as it may seem at first sight, tone is a hard nut to crack to most of us both in describing a tone language and in disentangling the patterns in which it participates in grammar. Not only does it increase conditions of complexity across languages, but it also makes the fieldwork on such languages challenging, especially for dialect surveys created for comparative purposes.1 Besides, tone raises issues on the boundaries between phonology and the phonetic implementation of pitch, as we try to reconcile tonemes, contours or gliding tones, tone sandhi and tone registers, prosodic heads, triggers, spread and check, plateaus, etc. with phonation or voice quality, downstep and downdrift effects, etc.

Tone remains a puzzling issue for both descriptive and theoretical linguistics. It interacts both with the natural classes of segmental phonology (obstruents vs. sonorants) and with phonation types (voicing, voice quality); it conflicts with other prosodic phenomena such as stress, rhythm and intonation;2 and it can get intertwined with both the grammar and the lexicon. But it is also impossible to circumvent. In this respect, given that nearly half of the world’s languages can be classified as tonal,3 one wonders to what extent tone is given its fair share in introductory courses in general and theoretical linguistics, as such courses set the foundations for a pool of future linguists.4

This book makes an attempt at disentangling this intricate web of factors. The way to face this challenge is to follow a clear-cut track. We do so here by sticking to inflectional tone and taking two empirical steps: we first focus on a highly representative area for this issue under study (i.e. the Oto-Manguean languages of Mexico) and then broaden our perspective to additional languages with inflectional tone, thus intending to identify universal trends.

An old course book on African languages by Diedrich Westermann and Ida Ward, published by Oxford University Press for the International Institute of African Languages in 1933, offered the following definition of tone:

“A tone language is one which makes a particular use of pitch as an element of speech. This special use consists in the employment of pitch for two purposes, viz. (1) To indicate meaning (semantic or etymological tones); (2) To show grammatical relationships (grammatical or syntactic ones)”.

(Westermann and Ward, 1990: 134, § 402)

This concise definition still largely holds, and can serve as a motif for this volume. All tonal languages use pitch as a component of the lexicon, but our focus is only on those that also use it as a component of inflection. We shall therefore distinguish between two main types of tone: the so-called ‘lexical tone’ and ‘relational tone’ (henceforth LT and RT, respectively).

Our primary interest is in RT, but to study RT accurately one has to understand its connections to LT (the opposite is not always true, depending on the type of inflectional system). In our opinion, far too much energy has been spent on describing LT traits in surveys and monographs: tone systems and tone sandhi rules, or tone etymology and tone shifts, especially in relation to segmental features converted into pitch. In contrast, only occasionally, at times even incidentally, are we told about phenomena involving RT: tones as autonomous morphemes, tonal paradigms, prosodic contour agreement and domains, etc. Monographs and cross-linguistic surveys mention these facts, but they either embed the questions in a lexical approach (rather than an inflectional one) or they scatter tonal information in phonotactic or morphosyntactic descriptions of the spread and check type, which have the fatal consequence of losing what should be our main priority: natural linguistic data. As a result, RT phenomena tend to be described as a by-product of the encounter of the lexicon and the grammar, and the overall picture thus obtained of both the mechanisms of RT and of its rules and constraints ends up as a heavy bundle of entangled phenomena. At times too, the handling of such phenomena becomes muddled with technical meta-language that makes most analyses of tone incomprehensible to outsiders of hardcore phonology.

Could we take an alternative approach to tone, an approach that is overtly inflectional? Can we make an attempt at disentangling the fabric of tone in grammar rather than in the lexicon or in the syntax, and skip phonetic implementation of tone for a moment? In this book we propose we can. In doing so, we gain insights on tone which go beyond traditional approaches.

LT descriptions often rely on diachronic and genetic explanations, such as for example transphonologisation or prosodisation of consonantal features resorting to phonation (see Haudricourt, 1972: 85–316, Gedney 1972, Yip 2002: 33–7, etc.). But what can be said about the fabric and origins of RT? Once we pose this question, many other questions pop up as if opening a Pandora’s Box. We mention here a few: Beyond diachrony and tonogenesis, what types of RT can be observed in languages? What triggers RTs? And what do RTs, in turn, trigger in the prosodic chain or in inflectional relations between lexical and functional heads? How autonomous are RTs? To what extent are they organic? Are they as strong as or even more robust than LTs? To what extent are they prone to allotony? What is their relation to default tones and patterns, such as mid tones or the so-called Obligatory Contour Principle constraints in the sense of McCarthy’s (1986)? How do they contrast with such more ‘neutral’ patterns? What else do they bring that LTs or stress cannot do? To what extent can the intricacy of tone patterns be disentangled through default assignation? Are RTs more relevant or more decisive in the overall system than LTs, or are they secondary and expletive devices? How strongly are they anchored to their domains? And to what extent does floating RT differ from anchored RT? What are the consequences of this positional dualism in morphological templates? etc.

Searching for answers to such questions, it becomes apparent that paradoxically, RT and morphotonology are the orphans of tone studies.5 Indeed, advances in the field of morphotonology may well have been jeopardized by the success of the two main phonological approaches to tone: the phonatory transphonologisation approach and the tone sandhi and tone syntax (or tonotactics) approach. As the focus of the field has been on the study of the phonetic properties of pitch and their integration into registers or prosodic domains from a phonological standpoint, and as much energy has been invested in distinguishing tone from stress or intonation, it really comes as no surprise that tone studies have hardly afforded the time to delve into the intricacies of RT from an inflectional standpoint. Because of this, we need to revisit RT from a more autonomous standpoint by looking into grammar. This will enhance our understanding of how tone serves as a fundamental actor in the making of inflection in many languages.

This book focuses on some important aspects of RT phenomenology on the basis of a few case studies. A cross-linguistically representative survey of inflectional tone in the world’s languages remains an ideal goal and in this book we have taken a step in this direction. Its core section includes a collection of articles on the Oto-Manguean languages, a large and very diverse linguistic family of Mexico with great RT complexity, which inspired Kenneth Pike’s (1948) seminal study on tone languages. The volume also includes a set of chapters tackling important issues concerning inflectional tonogenesis found in languages of other geographical areas, namely Asia, Africa and Papua New Guinea.

A focus on RT from the standpoint of inflection opens windows onto new landscapes as it were, some of which we explore in this volume. One of such topics is how tonal inflection may be sensitive to typological variation. In this respect, Palancar (this volume) outlines a preliminary typology of such variation. But we also wonder to what extent tone is sensitive to autopoiesis. In other words, how prone is tone to spontaneous emergence and self-organization in the making of grammar? This leads us to the issue of defining structural complexity in language; a central topic in current linguistic theory and typological studies (Newmeyer & Preston 2014, Miestamo et al. 2008). The contributions to this volume provide some possible answers to such questions:

–Integration of formerly free domains. RT can stem from once relatively free domains, such as, for example, the definite determiner in Bamana (Vydrin, this volume) or the light verbs of Mazatec (Léonard & Fulcrand, this volume).

–Sound change and traces. RT often turns out to be a resilient expression of some former – or underlying – segmental substance, for example resulting from adjustment rules between stems and affixes based on natural class properties (e.g. “level and falling tones appearing in closed syllables with sonorants and obstruent codas, respectively”, Jacques, this volume).

–Tonal semiosis, as in Dan (Vydrin, this volume), where the escalation in contrastive levels (or registers) ends up with super high or super low tones – a similar trend can be observed in Chinantec and some other Oto-Manguean languages. This little game may be called pitch class competition, giving birth to patterns such as those mentioned by Hyman (this volume) for Iau telic vs. atelic verbs. In this case, the spiral of level and contour tones whirls around a value such as telicity or aspect in the logic of a musical scale, rather than resulting from arbitrary assignment.6

Integration of free domains, sound change as well as traces and tonal semiosis constitute appealing hunting grounds for the study of RT from the perspective of inflectional morphology. However, these topics provide but a glimpse of the intricate phenomenology of tone.

We hope that the present collection of papers on tone and inflection inspires broader research on RT, giving rise to more studies and making the morphological landscape across languages with tonal inflection easier to explore. Whatever may be the limits of this endeavor, one basic assumption should hold for further research: in order for RT to be integrated into both phonological and morphological theory, it first needs to be disentangled, and to achieve that we should not be afraid of its complexities.

Most contributions to this volume provide first-hand data from recent fieldwork. As RT complexity is often found in endangered languages across the world, these studies show the importance of language documentation for future generations. In this light, not only can this volume contribute to theoretical debates on the interface between tonology and other domains of language through its morphology, but it also may raise issues for further empirical studies within the framework of language documentation (cf. also Gippert et al. 2006, Austin & Sallabank 2011). After all, inflectional patterns made up of tones are part of an endangered complexity and, to some extent, of the ecology of language structures at large.

The volume is a collection of eleven selected articles on the relation between tone and inflectional morphology in different languages. The authors are specialists of one or more of the languages under study. The volume is divided into two parts. One part focuses on general questions with a special emphasis on inflectional tonogenesis. The second part includes a selection of papers on the Oto- Manguean languages of Mexico. This is relevant because within Oto-Manguean one finds the most complex morphological systems we know of, and a great part of that complexity is due to tone. We also believe it is important to give these languages more prominence since most materials are in Spanish and they have passed undetected on the radar of typological literature. We will now give a brief overview of the contributions the volume.

Part 1. Tone and inflection: General questions with a focus on inflectional tonogenesis.

In his paper “Morphological tonal assignments in conflict: Who wins?” Larry Hyman addresses three significant issues: (a) What is the inventory of morphological “contributors” to verb tone paradigms? (b) What happens if different contributors conflict? And most importantly, (c) what can we learn from this about how tonal morphology works in general? Hyman shows that tone can do everything that segmental (i.e. non-tonal) morphology can do, and he shows that it can even do much more than that, because due to its suprasegmental nature it can extend beyond the syntactic phrase, blurring the distinction between phonology, morphology, and syntax. The analysis is based on Hyman’s vast knowledge of African languages, but serving as a bridge from Africa to the New World, it also includes a possible analysis of Macuiltianguis Zapotec, an Oto-Manguean language of the Zapotecan branch.

The article by Sebastian Fedden is about the emergence of tone as an inflectional formative in Mian, a Papuan language of the Ok family. Mian is a word-tone language whose lexemes are specified for one out of a set of five tonemes, but tone does little to inflection except for a tiny corner of the grammar that Fedden reveals to us. In Mian, the non-hodiernal past and the imperfective are realized by a homophonous segmental marker. Despite this homophony, many verbs have an aspectual stem distinction that keeps the two grammatical senses apart. For the verbs without the aspectual distinction, a high tone intervenes on the mora of the subject suffix realizing the non-hodiernal past, making the inflected form phonologically distinct from the imperfective. This shows how tone can be recruited for an inflectional purpose. Fedden also shows that this high tone is also found in a set of verbs with aspectual stems. While its occurrence in such forms is redundant from a functional point of view, it is an instance of multiple exponence, which is a property typically associated with complex morphological systems.

In his contribution, Guillaume Jacques studies the nature of the complex stem alternations of the verbal inflection of Khaling, a Sino...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of contents
• 1 Tone and inflection: An introduction
• Part 1: Tone and inflection:General questions with a focus on inflectional tonogenesis
• Part 2: Tone and inflection:Insights from the Oto-Manguean languages
• Subject index
• Language index
• Footnotes