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Re: tonal languages?

From:Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>
Date:Monday, December 15, 2003, 2:21
On Sun, 14 Dec 2003 19:50:20 -0500, John Cowan <cowan@...>
wrote:

> Herman Miller scripsit: > >> Now if you have a language that includes tone as part of the regular >> system >> of sounds that make up words (what we technically refer to as a "phoneme >> inventory"), it would be possible to have a morpheme (a minimal unit of >> meaning) that is expressed entirely by changes in tone. > > In the Taishan dialect of Cantonese, spoken in Chinatowns worldwide, > pronouns are pluralized by changing the tone.
I can't find the bit I was looking for, but _Describing Morphosyntax_ (p30) says: Some languages, especially in Africa and Meso-America, use tone modification to signal very common morphological operations like tense and aspect. The book subsequently goes on, in some detail -- as does _Language Universals And Linguistic Typology_ -- with examples of the way this works in various languages and situations. If I had myself better prepared, I'd produce those examples. If anyone's interested, I'll see if I can dig them out tomorrow evening. Paul

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