Grammatical tone: Typology and theory

Why Typology Doesn’t Matter to Grammatical Theory

Amazonia and the Typology of Tone Systems

The typology of tone and word-prosodic systems in general has been of longstanding interest to theorists and field workers alike. Unfortunately, much of the early typologizing dates from a time when we did not have adequate understanding of the full range of tonal phenomena across languages, e.g. African and Asian tone systems figured centrally in such typologizing, e.g. Pike’s (1948) famous di...

Grammatical typology and frequency analysis: number availability and number use

The Smith-Stark hierarchy, a version of the Animacy Hierarchy, offers a typology of the cross-linguistic availability of number. The hierarchy predicts that the availability of number is not arbitrary. For any language , if the expression of plural is available to a noun, it is available to any noun of a semantic category further to the left of the hierarchy. In this article we move one step fu...

A Typology of Contour Tone Restrictions

This paper presents results of a survey of contour tones in 105 languages with lexical tone. Results indicate an implicational hierarchy of tone bearing ability, whereby long vowels are most likely to carry contour tones, followed by syllables containing a short vowel plus a sonorant coda, followed by syllables containing a short vowel plus an obstruent coda, followed by open syllables containi...

Unification and Grammatical Theory