Re: Grammatical tones

| -----Original Message-----
| From: Christopher Wright
| Subject: Grammatical tones
|
| How plausible is it for tones to have a grammatical
| rather than lexical meaning? For instance, where many
| languages have articles, this one would have different
| tones instead. Or perhaps verb number or tense would be
| indicated thus.

        It occurs in natlangs.
        From what I remember of Demotic (common) Greek, the subjunctive is
formed by changing a vowel in the indicative inflectional ending, and moving
the stress accent one vowel towards the front of the word. The stress is
usually on the second to the last vowel, but is on the third to the last
vowel for subjunctive verbs. However, there is also a change in the
inflection.

        I believe it's the book "Describing Morphosyntax" that gives an
example from an African language where tone pattern is the only thing to
distinguish between two different tense/aspect states of the same clause
(person and number doesn't change). I don't have the book with me right now,
unfortunately....

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