Hyman Leben Word prosody II Tone Systems Full Uncut Version

All languages use “tone” if what is meant is either pitch or the F0 variations that are unavoidable in spoken language. However, this is not what is generally meant when the term is used by phonologists. Instead, there is a major typological split between those languages that use tone to distinguish morphemes and words vs. those that do not. Found in large numbers of languages in Sub-Saharan Africa, East and Southeast Asia, parts of New Guinea, Mexico, the Northwest Amazon and elsewhere, tone can be used to distinguish lexical morphemes (e.g. noun and verb roots) or grammatical functions. Thus, in the following examples the same eight-way tonal contrast has a lexical function on nouns, but marks the indicated grammatical distinctions on the verb /ba/ ‘come’ in Iau [Lakes Plain; West Papua] (Bateman 1990:35-36):1