Re: When are Pitch-accents and Tonemes too bothersome?

James wrote:

<<In languages with tones, are they used morphosyntactically or
contrastively more often? Are there languages that do both? I
ask because I recently decided to incorporate a high and low tone
contrast in emindahken, but I haven't decided whether to use
them morpho'ly or contrast'ly.>>

Chichewa does both.   So there are tons of words that contrast via tone (such
as /mtengo/ 1-4-3 vs. /mtengo/ 1-1-1 and there's one more, and I completely
forget what these mean.   I think one is "buy" and the other is "tree").
There are also morphological processes that utilize tone.   For example, this
might be one (I can't remember) where the genitive is formed with downstep (i.e.,
the whole tone range becomes progressively lower with each genitival
construction).   I know, though, that this is a language where if you change a word to
a particular tone pattern it becomes an insult.   So, if you take /mtengo/ and
make the tone 1-5-1, it becomes an insult.   (I imagine kind of like how
there's "your mother" and "Your mother!")   It's my impression, though, that
morphological processes that target tone are less common.   It'd be nice if they
were just as common as with segmental morphology, but they don't seem to be, for
whatever reason.

-David
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