International Summer School on
Language Documentation and Description

Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, Leiden

5 July - 17 July 2010

Tone

The majority of the world’s languages, including most endangered languages, are tone languages. Although many researchers are daunted at the prospect of describing and analyzing a tone language, the basics of a practical methodology for tone analysis can be acquired in a relatively short period of time. Researchers venturing into the field will be able to make a good start and develop a strategy for further research in the topic.

Researchers preparing for fieldwork in such languages need to collect data for tone analysis and be prepared for listening to and transcribing the surface pitches of words and longer utterances. Their next challenge is discovering the underlying tonal melodies associated with the major grammatical classes- nouns and verbs- from the surface pitch they have heard. With a practical methodology and typological background, researchers will be able to achieve these aims. My experience is in tone in African languages; the principles of the approach, however, should be valid for tone languages worldwide.

The course will be taught for nine days, two and a half hours per day, including daily time for practical tone-reading and tone-listening exercises.

Topics to be covered:

• Introduction
  
  • Tone in the world’s languages; tone in African languages
    
  • What is a tone language?
    
• Surface and underlying structure
• Typology of tone systems
• Practical methodology
  • Data gathering and organizing the data for tone analysis
    
  • Listening and mimicking
  • Transcribing pitch/tone
  • Interpreting tones and tonal melodies; making hypotheses for the underlying system
  • How to proceed with further details of the tone analysis
• Some frequently occurring tonal phenomena
  
  • Tone spreading, Tone shifting
    
  • Downdrift and Downstep
    
  • Depressor consonants
• Function of tone
  
  • Functional load
    
  • Lexical function of tone
    
  • Grammatical function of tone

If there is time, and interest on the part of the students, additional lectures can cover:

• Tone orthography
• Tone teaching