A floating tone is a

morpheme A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this ...

or element of a morpheme that contains neither

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

s nor

vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

s, but only tone. It cannot be pronounced by itself but affects the tones of neighboring morphemes. An example occurs in Bambara, a Mande language of Mali that has two

phonemic A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...

tones, ''high'' and ''low.'' The

definite article In grammar, an article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech. In English, both "the" ...

is a floating low tone, and with a noun in isolation, it is associated with the preceding vowel and turns a high tone into a falling tone: á''river;'' â''the river''. When it occurs between two high tones, it downsteps the following tone: * ''it's not a river'' * (or ) ''it's not the river'' Also common are floating tones associated with a segmental morpheme such as an affix. For example, in Okphela, an Edoid language of Nigeria, the main negative morpheme is distinguished from the present tense morpheme by tone; the present tense morpheme (á-) carries high tone, whereas the negative past 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'' Floating tones derive historically from morphemes which assimilate or lenite to the point that only their tone remains.Trutenau, H.M.J. 1972. "A sketch of tone rules required for a generative transformational grammar of Ga (a terraced level tone language)." Linguistics 79: 83-96.

References

Tone (linguistics) {{phonetics-stub