SIL Electronic Working Papers
SILEWP 2007-007
- Author:
Michael Cahill
Title: More Universals of Tone
Language: Konni
Country: Ghana
Abstract:
Paper: PDF (1164Kb, 10 pages)This paper reviews some "tone universals" that were previously proposed, and proposes three additional cross-linguistic tonal tendencies: (a) floating tones migrate rightward, (b) words with all-Low tones are dispreferred, and (c) a HLH phonetic sequence is dispreferred. These are violated often enough so that the term "universal" is overly ambitious, but they occur across a wide areal and genetic variety of languages, so a complete typology of tone should include and account for these.
Revised article posted 2008-11
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