Talk:Floating tone

conversation 1

The definition of floating tone is too narrow. I think the example given is a special case: a floating tone which is associated with a phonologically empty morpheme.

More common, I think, are floating tones associated with an overt morpheme such as a prefix, and which dock on an adjacent vowel. For example, in Okphela, a Niger-Congo language of Nigeria, the main negative morpheme is distinguished from the present tense morpheme by tone; the present tense morpheme (á-) carries high tone, and the negative morpheme (´a-) imposes a high tone on the syllable which precedes it:

 oh á-nga 'he is climbing'         óh a-nga 'he didn't climb'

The relative clause marker of Okphela has a high tone whichs docks to the right. RCs begin with relative marker ni´ ~ n´. The second variant of REL occurs before vowels.

70.65.138.235 18:42, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Point taken. I've added your example to the text, but will replace it with something else (eventually) if we can't standardize it. What would your example be in the IPA? What name does Okphela go by in Ethnologue? kwami 19:28, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

It must belong to the Edoid dialect cluster which goes by the name Ivbie North-Okpela-Arhe in the Ethnologue (code atg). Malhonen (talk) 12:56, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

conversation 2

What are your reference materials? Thanks,

Anja 82.111.242.96 (talk) 21:00, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

added

added some citations but im not sure its in the best format. Pulmonological (talk) 02:59, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Having taken a brief glance at the citation list, I'm not sure if these citations accurately support the propositions in this article. For example, the first proposition ("A floating tone is a morpheme") cites to pages 29-73 of Mary Clark's "Representation of downstep in Dschang Bamileke". There's no reason to think we need to cite to 45 pages to say that a floating tone is a morpheme. Moreover, it seems like all of the references for this article are copied from citation number 2 ("Floating tones in Gã", http://elanguage.net/journals/sal/article/view/1366). While that doesn't mean these citations don't support the propositions in this article, I am worried that citations were copied over indiscriminately. Talu42 (talk) 23:53, 24 March 2013 (UTC)