[Lingtyp] Query: replacive grammatical tone

[Laura McPherson]

Dear colleagues,

I have been interested in the typology of grammatical tone for some years
now, specifically the typology of replacive grammatical tone. I am
currently working on a paper that makes the claim that an implicational
relationship holds between phrase-level replacive tone and word-level
replacive tone: any language with phrase-level replacive tone will also
have word-level replacive tone, but not vice versa. The Dogon languages of
Mali provide a prime example. All languages in this family display phrasal
replacive tone in noun phrases, wherein certain syntactic categories
trigger replacive melodies on c-commanded words (McPherson 2014, McPherson
and Heath 2016). For instance, adjectives and demonstratives trigger {L}
and pronominal possessors trigger {H(L)} in Tommo So, illustrated in (1)
with the noun /bàbé/ (lexically LH):

(1) a. {bàbè kòmmò}.L nɔ́  'this skinny uncle'
     b. mí {babe}.H 'my uncle'

The Dogon languages also display word-level replacive tone on the verb,
triggered by TAM marking. Consider the partial paradigm below in Tommo So
for the verb /káná/ 'do':

(2) a. kànà-lí  'did not do'   ({L})
    b.  kánà-dɛ̀ 'does' ({HL})
    c. káná 'do!' ({H})

Phrase-level replacive tone is, in my experience, rarer than word-level
replacive tone, and in every language I have seen with phrase-level
replacive tone, word-level replacive tone is also attested (Dogon,
Kalabari, Awa, Usarufa, Urarina).

I am wondering if anyone is aware of any further examples that either
support or challenge this claim. I would like to make the claim that the
development of phrase-level replacive tone depends on the existence of
word-level replacive tone; in the absence of such a template, phonological
changes that would result in restructuring phrase-level prosody into a
system of replacive tone would need to undergo a different evolutionary
path or be lost.

Best wishes,

Laura

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Laura McPherson
Assistant Professor of Linguistics
Dartmouth College
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