Whether tone should be represented in writing, and if so how much, is one of the most formidable challenges facing those developing orthographies for tone languages. Various researchers have attempted to quantify the level of written ambiguity in a language if tone is not marked, but these contributions are not easily comparable because they use…

Linguists tend to believe that total complexity of human languages is invariable. In order to test this hypothesis empirically, we need to calculate the complexity in different domains of language structure: phonology, morphology, syntax, etc. In this paper I provide some guidelines for documenting tonal systems and evaluating their complexity. I…

Karbi is a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language spoken by half a million people in the Karbi Anglong district in Assam, Northeast India, and surrounding areas in the extended Brahmaputra Valley area. It is an agglutinating, verb-final language. This dissertation offers a description of the dialect spoken in the hills of the Karbi Anglong district. It is…

The purpose of the dissertation is to examine Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of a syntax-dependent phonological rule Tone 3 Sandhi (T3S). A Tone 3 (low dipping tone) is changed to a Tone 2 (mid rising tone) when it is followed by another Tone 3. Application of T3S in fact involves a complex process. In setting up the prosodic domains…

First language (L1) attrition research focuses on syntactic and morphological deterioration in environments where L1 "attriters" rarely have contact with their L1, such as immigrants. There is no study that investigates L1 attrition in tones and in contexts where L1 can still be often heard. This study examines this attrition type in…

This dissertation is a grammar of Rena (ISO bez), a Bantu language spoken in southwestern Tanzania by approximately 600,000 people. Bena is largely undocumented, and though aspects of Bena grammar have been described, there is no usable, detailed treatment of the Bena language. Therefore the goal of this dissertation is provide the first detailed…

Presents a preliminary study on the analysis of cleft sentences in Chinese, defining the cleft sentence in Chinese, clarifying its relationship to equation sentences, and discussing two alternative analyses. (Author/AM)

A review of previous analyses of the syntax of Fuzhou Tone Sandhi precedes the exploration of grammatical relations and the application of phrase-level tone sandhi rules, concluding that modifiers, but not arguments, preceding the head can undergo tone sandhi, as can heads preceding arguments, but not modifiers. (18 references) (Author/CB)

A DESCRIPTION OF THE GBAYA PEOPLES LIVING IN THE DISTRICT OF BOSSANGOA IN THE NORTHWESTERN PART OF THE CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC IS PRESENTED IN THE INTRODUCTION TO THIS COMPREHENSIVE STUDY OF THE GBAYA LANGUAGE. (THE LANGUAGE IS SPELLED VARIOUSLY BEA, GBEA, AND GBAYA.) IN THREE SECTIONS, THE FIRST PART OF THE TEXT DEALS WITH THE PHONOLOGY AND…

The traditional division of the Chinese syllable into initial, final, and tone is examined. Distributional criteria are used to justify this analysis as more applicable to the Cantonese syllable than strict segmental analysis. A detailed analysis of the Cantonese final is given and implications for cross-language analyses are discussed. (CHK)

An analysis of tone in language begins with the observation that the structural approach taken in segmental phonology, analyzing complex tones in terms of sequences of level tones, is not necessarily appropriate with tone languages. A different approach is proposed, a "dynamic-tone" theory that represents tone contours entirely in terms…

Bini, a language spoken by a million horticulturists in and around Benin City, Nigeria, belongs genealogically to the Edo branch of the Kwa family of the Niger-Congo phylum. Bini dialects differ in their tonemic inventory, which ranges from four to six tonemes per dialect. But all dialects exhibit two morphotonemes--high and low--which perhaps…

This introductory text in Punjabi (also spelled Panjabi) is intended primarily for those whose mother tongue is not Punjabi but are native speakers of other Indian languages. Some familiarity with the Punjabi cultural items is presupposed. The non-Indian may, however, also be able to use this text with profit since the lessons are graded. The…

These papers were written as supporting documents for a colloquium on the Vietnamese language. The first catalogues and analyzes Vietnamese vowels, diphthongs, consonants and tones. The second analyzes some facets of Vietnamese syntax. (CHK)

This volume, a collection of selected papers from the Conference on African Languages and Linguistics organized by the Department of Linguistics of the University of Illinois and held at Urbana-Champaign on April 24-25, 1970, contains: W. E. Welmers, "The Typology of the Proto-Niger-Kordofanian Noun Class System"; D. Dalby, "A…