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Abstract

The literature on the acquisition of tone is dominated by East Asian languages, but as the characteristics of tone systems vary across language families, many tonal phenomena remain virtually unstudied. One such phenomenon is grammatical tone, uncommon in East Asia but quite prevalent in African languages. This paper presents the first analysis of grammatical tone acquisition in Seenku (Mande, Burkina Faso), focusing on verbs. Seenku’s tone system has characteristics of both Asian and African tone systems, with four contrastive levels and multiple contour tones, hosted by largely mono- and sesquisyllabic lexical items. I investigate the acquisition of two classes of grammatical tone found on verbs: morphological tone, wherein tone is the primary exponent of a morpheme, and argument-head tone sandhi, which is sensitive to morphosyntactic structure but does not directly encode any meaning. Preliminary analysis of naturalistic data from four children (1;6-4;0) shows that children have good command of both types from their earliest utterances, but with overall higher accuracy for morphological tone than for the more complex patterns of tone sandhi. Accuracy for lexical tone is intermediate between the findings for East Asian languages, without grammatical tone, and Bantu languages, where grammatical alternations in verbs obscure lexical tone categories.

Keywords

Tone Mande TAM phonology morphology

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The acquisition of verbal tone in Seenku (Mande,Burkina Faso)

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