[Lingtyp] Inherently toneless morphemes in tone languages

[Randy LaPolla]

Hi David,
That is quite interesting. Singlish is historically basically Southern Min Chinese spoken with English words, and Southern Min has a tone sandhi pattern that is usually analyzed as having only the last syllable in a phrase as the citation tone, and all of the preceding tones in the sandhi tones, a pattern that has some similarity with the one you mentioned. I wonder if there is a connection. 

Randy

Sent from my phone

> On 24 Aug 2021, at 11:52 PM, David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> Dear Ratanon and all,
> 
> 
> 
> Oddly, some non-tonal languages of Southeast Asia seem to exhibit a mirror-image pattern to the one you describe; there it seems as though the sentence-final particles are the only forms that ARE tonal, though whether this is really lexical tone as opposed to intonation remains an open question. This has been argued for Singlish (colloquial Singaporean English), and I think could plausibly also be argued for some varieties of Malay.
> 
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> I suspect that some languages of the Sough Halmahera West New Guinea subgroup of Austronesian might also fit the bill, albeit in different ways.  For Moor, David Kamholz has argued that lexical tone only shows up on the final syllable of the phonological phrase, all other syllables remaining toneless.  And for Roon, I have described a tonal distinction in a single inflectional paradigm involving inalienable possession, while all the rest of the language, way over 99% of it, lacks lexical tone.
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> All of the above examples are thus perhaps more appropriately described as "inherently tonal morphemes in non-tone languages" ...
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> 
> David
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> 
> On 24/08/2021 15:39, Ratanon Jiamsundutsadee wrote:
>> Dear all,
>> 
>> Is anyone familiar with tone languages which are analyzed to have "toneless" morphemes, i.e. not specified for tone in the underlying representation?
>> 
>> For example, some final particles in Thai have been analyzed to be inherently toneless, exhibiting their surface pitch contour only due to their linkage to intonational-phrase-final boundary tones.
>> 
>> (1) rāw  cʰɔ̂ɔp  tàw    kʰa-L%
>>      1SG like     turtle  FP
>>      'I like turtles.' (/kʰa/ = formal, female speaking)
>> 
>> (2) nâarák máj   kʰa-H%
>>       cute     FP    FP
>>      'Aren't they cute?' (/máj/ = neutral interrogative; /kʰa/ = formal, female speaking)
>> 
>> Traditionally, /kʰá/ and /kʰâ~kʰà/ would be treated as fully specified for tone and distinct from each other. So far, I have encountered somewhat similar accounts (of certain morphemes, particularly final particles, which are said to be tonally unspecified) in Mandarin and Cantonese.
>> 
>> Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!
>> 
>> Kind regards,
>> Ratanon Jiamsundutsadee
>> 
>> 
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> -- 
> David Gil
> 
> Senior Scientist (Associate)
> Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
> Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
> Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, 04103, Germany
> 
> Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
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