[Lingtyp] Summary of the discussion on the loss of tone (tonoexodus)

[Larry M. HYMAN]

Thanks, Dan and Ian, and good to emphasize the contact situation as the
African non-tone systems tend to be in contact with Berber or Arabic
(except for a few inland Bantu languages which have had no known non-tonal
contact). I want to point out a couple of things. While it might make sense
to think of grammatical tonal contrasts being lost before lexical tonal
contrasts (as in creoles), there also are cases where tone is lost on
lexical morphemes (nouns, verbs etc.) but not on grammatical morphemes,
i.e. where tone is only grammatical. I'm thinking of Chimwiini (Bantu;
Somalia) (Kisseberth & Abasheikh 2011), and Somali used to be this way
before it borrowed so much from Arabic (and got lexical tone). I don't know
the history of Basque but Gitxo dialect has mostly grammatical tone (Hualde
& Bilbao 1992). On the other hand, in support of what you (Dan) say, while
the most common systems have (almost) exclusive lexical tone (e.g. Chinese)
or have both lexical and grammatical tone (e.g. almost all African and
Mexican tone systems), exclusive grammatical tone is much rarer. I would
however not attribute this to [±grammatical tone], rather to [±morphology].
The languages with little grammatical tone also have little segmental
morphology. Finally, coming back to Korean tone, there are traditions and
researchers who prefer to call systems with limited, privative H tone
"pitch-accent", a term that has been used (among other things) to talk
about what others of us prefer to call "sparse tone systems". There can be
the result of tonogenesis limited only to certain phonological or word
positions--OR be the last stage of tonoexodus. In any case, there are
natural processes by which tones merge, ultimately to be lost.


On Sat, Nov 9, 2019 at 1:11 PM Dan I. SLOBIN <slobin at berkeley.edu> wrote:

> As a psycholinguist and child language researcher, issues of processing
> come to mind,  Clearly, grammatical functions of tone can be served by
> other means, and this appears to happen in long-contact situations,
> suggesting some burden to acquiring and using tone to mark grammatical
> distinctions when alternatives are available.  This possibility seems to be
> supported by the suggestion that tone may be kept in ideophones, where it
> serves an expressive rather than a grammatical function.  Is there research
> along these lines?
>
> Dan Slobin
>
> On Sat, Nov 9, 2019 at 12:44 PM Joo, Ian <joo at shh.mpg.de> wrote:
>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> Many thanks for providing fruitful comments and insights on the question
>> about the loss of tone, or *tonoexodus* as it was previously coined by
>> Wayne Lea. Many have pointed out Korean is indeed not the only language
>> whose tonoexodus we can observe, because there are: creole languages in
>> contact with non-tonal European superstrata (Kofi Yakpo); certain Chinese
>> dialects in Indonesia (David Gil); certain Slavic and Baltic languages
>> (Ilja Seržant); Quiaviní Zapotec (Hiroto Uchihara); Chacobo (Adam James
>> Ross Tallman); and others. It seems that the general pattern is not an
>> abrupt shift from tonal to atonal, but rather a gradual shift from
>> completely tonal to tonal only in certain phonotactic or lexical boundaries
>> (e. g. only in long syllables or only in ideophones). So perhaps tono
>> “exodus” is a better term with the term I tried to coin, tono “thanasia”,
>> because exodus is gradual whereas death is (more or less) abrupt.
>> Also thanks to Don Killian for pointing out that tones survive in certain
>> Korean dialects. I wasn’t sure if they had tones or pitch-accent, but
>> thanks for sharing literature on the tonality of these dialects.
>> Needless to say, it would be a great paper to write an overviewing
>> summary of the typology of tonoexodus.
>>
>> From Jena, Germany,
>> Ian
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>
>
> --
>
> *<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> *
>
> *Dan I. Slobin *
>
> *Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Linguistics*
>
> *University of California, Berkeley*
>
> *email: slobin at berkeley.edu <slobin at berkeley.edu>*
>
> *address: 2323 Rose St., Berkeley, CA 94708*
>
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-- 
Larry M. Hyman, Professor of Linguistics & Executive Director,
France-Berkeley Fund
Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/people/person_detail.php?person=19
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