Quantifying written ambiguities in tone languages: A comparative study of Elip, Mbelime, and Eastern Dan (original) (raw)
Related papers
In certain tone languages, orthography stakeholders are open to the possibility of some kind of partial representation of tone. But how can the researcher know for sure which parts of the language need to be targeted for disambiguation? This paper proposes that analysis of written ambiguity can help to answer this question. It is a method involving three stages: the development of a homograph corpus, a frequency and distribution analysis of homographs in natural texts and a miscue analysis of oral reading performance. The method is applied to Kabiye (Gur, Togo), the standard orthography of which does not currently mark tone. The conditional clause is traced through each of these three stages, ending with a proposal for its modification. This method demonstrates the extent to which the Linguistics of Writing can enrich a debate that has long been dominated by utterance-based phonological analysis.
The standard orthography of Kabiye (Togo) does not mark tone. In such a context, how can a researcher adequately assess the degree of ambiguity in the written language and make a valid contribution to the debate about how tone might be incorporated in the second generation of language development? This article approaches that question, not from the perspective of phonological analysis which has tended to dominate the literature, but from the point of view of the linguistics of writing. Applying Catach's (1984) model of lexical ambiguity for Kabiye, it advocates the development of a homograph corpus in which words, roots and affixes are included or excluded on the basis of semantic, morphological and dialectal criteria. A homographic prefix with pronominal, negative and immediative interpretations illustrates how the corpus is then applied to a frequency and distribution analysis of ambiguity in natural written contexts, and an analysis of oral reading errors in the classroom. A dictation task reveals that subjects who were taught a segmental modification of the negative prefix write with greater accuracy than subjects who were taught to add tone diacritics.
Tone in grammar: What we already know and what we still don't
In this paper, I provide an overview of tone encoding grammatical meanings, a phenomenon which to date has been insufficiently studied in depth by typologists, nor theoretical morphologists. A starting point for the present discussion is the newly published volume “Tone and inflection” (Palancar, Léonard eds. 2016), which contains a collection of papers focusing on inflectional tone in various languages, but mainly Oto-Manguean. I discuss basic formal and semantic properties of tone in grammar illustrating my claims with examples from the “Tone and inflection” volume as well as with cases from various African languages. I suggest and justify several implicational hypotheses covering typological patterning of grammatical tones; these proposed generalizations should be tested in a balanced survey in the future.
In many tone languages, decision makers have opted for zero representation of tone. This generates homographic tonal minimal pairs that may trigger oral reading miscues. But it would be wrong to attribute the source of all miscues just to tonal minimal pairs; there may be other aspects of the orthography’s profile that inhibit word recognition. In the standard orthography of the Kabiye verb phrase, subject pronouns and modal morphemes are written attached to the root. The unforeseen secondary effect of this decision is that the identity of the root is often masked because the morpheme boundary is not explicit. A homograph analysis reveals that morphemic mismatches generate numerous tonal minimal pairs. But a miscue analysis reveals that the problem extends beyond these to any verb phrase that contains infrequent, alternating or multiple prefixes, whether or not they are homographs. It follows that to disambiguate just tonal minimal pairs would only solve half the problem. A modification that highlights the morpheme boundary would directly address the real source of readers’ difficulties. The results of a dictation task in a classroom experiment indicate that root initial capital letters would be a promising solution.
Tone and inflection: An introduction
2015
Tone is about melody and meaning, inflection is about grammar and this book is about a bit of both. The different papers in this book study possible and sometimes very complex ways in which the melodies of a given language engage in the expression of grammatical meaning. In this light, the volume aims to broaden our understanding of the role of tone in the making of grammar. We believe this is important because it challenges a widespread conception of tone as being a lexical phenomenon only. This conception flows from the expectation that any typical tone language should be like Mandarin Chinese or Vietnamese, but these are languages with little or no inflectional morphology. The contributions in this volume challenge this view by showing that there is more to tone than meets the eye.
Strategies for analyzing tone languages
Language Documentation & Conservation, 2014
This paper outlines a method of auditory and acoustic analysis for determining the tonemes of a language starting from scratch, drawing on the author’s experience of recording and analyzing tone languages of north-east India. The methodology is applied to a preliminary analysis of tone in the Thang dialect of Khiamniungan, a virtually undocumented language of extreme eastern Nagaland and adjacent areas of the Sagaing Division, Myanmar (Burma). Following a discussion of strategies for ensuring that data appropriate for tonal analysis will be recorded, the practical demonstration begins with a description of how tone categories can be established according to their syllable type in the preliminary auditory analysis. The paper then uses this data to describe a method of acoustic analysis that ultimately permits the representation of pitch shapes as a function of absolute mean duration. The analysis of grammatical tones, floating tones and tone sandhi are exemplified with Mongsen Ao data, and a description of a perception test demonstrates how this can be used to corroborate the auditory and acoustic analysis of a tone system.