Seminar in Grammatical Tone

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

This course is an advanced graduate seminar in phonology that examines the ways in which tone, a phonological phenomenon, serves a morphological or syntactic function across languages, referred to as grammatical or melodic tone. We will discuss typological issues in grammatical tone relating to their properties, and where grammatical tone is found cross-linguistically, but our focus will be on African and Mesoamerican languages. We will also discuss methodological approaches to analyzing grammatical tone such as floating autosegmental tones, tonal rules or tonal construction schemas and how grammatical tone interacts with phonological rules and morphosyntactic derivations. The class will also investigate how grammatical tones incorporate tonal and intonational properties. Some of the questions we will explore include: (i) what is the range of variation documented to date in grammatical tone systems? (ii) what kind of phenomena motivate different types of analyses? (iii) what kinds of predictions are made within each type of analytical approach? (iv) what is the relationship (if any) between types of grammatical tone patterns and other aspects of individual languages' prosodic systems (e.g., size of tonal inventory, distribution of tones, etc.)? Students who enroll in the seminar will be encouraged to consider previously unanalyzed data in developing novel analyses.