The grammatical primacy of tone in Cushitic
Keywords:
Cushitic, tone, accent, stress, morphology, typology
Abstract
The current dimensions in the typology of tone are not insightful for understanding the properties of tone in Cushitic languages. Some Cushitic languages are characterised as “pitch-accent” and these cannot be considered stress languages because the criterion of obligatoriness of every word having a stressed unit is not valid for them. In Hyman’s (2006) typology these languages are (restricted) tone languages. Pitch as prominence marker does show stress-like tendencies of culminativity and demarcation in these languages which is why a label pitch-accent has been suggested. The tone properties are better explained by another dimension, namely the fact that the distinctive function of tone hardly plays a role at the lexical level but does play a role at the grammatical level
Published
2021-08-22
How to Cite
Mous, M. (2021). The grammatical primacy of tone in Cushitic. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus, 62(1), 91-106. https://doi.org/10.5842/62-0-898
Section
Articles
Copyright (c) 2021 Maarten Mous
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