How To Study a Tone Language

dc.contributor.authorHyman, Larry
dc.date.accessioned2014-11-10T18:53:28Z
dc.date.available2014-11-10T18:53:28Z
dc.date.issued2014-12
dc.description.abstractIn response to requests I have often got as to how one approaches a tone language, I present a personal view of the three stages involved, starting from scratch and arriving at an analysis: Stage I: Determining the tonal contrasts and their approximate phonetic allotones. Stage II: Discovering any tonal alternations (“morphotonemics”). Stage III: establishing the tonal analysis itself. While most emphasis in the literature concerns this last stage, I show how the analysis crucially depends on the first two. A detailed illustration is presented from Oku, a Grassfields Bantu language spoken in Cameroon on which I personally worked in the field. The paper concludes with discussion of issues arising in other tone languages, illustrated by Corejuage (Tukanoan, Colombia), Peñoles Mixtec (Otomanguean, Mexico), Villa Alta Yatzachi Zapotec (Otomanguean, Mexico), Luganda (Bantu, Uganda), Hakha Lai (Tibeto-Burman, Myanmar and Northeast India), and Haya (Bantu, Tanzania). *This paper is in the series How to Study a Tone Language, edited by Steven Bird and Larry Hyman
dc.description.sponsorshipNational Foreign Language Resource Center
dc.identifier.citationHyman, Larry M.  2014. How To Study a Tone Language, with exemplification from Oku (Grassfields Bantu, Cameroon). Language Documentation & Conservation 8: 525—562
dc.identifier.isbn978-0-9856211-2-4
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10125/24624
dc.publisherUniversity of Hawai'i Press
dc.rightsCreative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License
dc.titleHow To Study a Tone Language
dc.typeArticle
prism.endingpage562
prism.publicationnameLanguage Documentation & Conservation
prism.startingpage525
prism.volume8

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