The shape and spread of tone

Abstract

It is not news that tone is a property of language that interacts with other parts of the linguistic system (e.g. Plank 1998 and references therein). This paper examines the distribution of tone languages from the perspective of areal typology, comparing the occurrence of different kinds of tone languages to the regions they are in, the families they belong to, and some of the more salient characteristics of the language beyond its tonal system Show more