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A floating tone is a morpheme or element of a morpheme that contains neither consonants nor vowels, 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 tones, high and low. The definite article 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: river; 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.

References

1. Clark, Mary M. 1993. "Representation of downstep in Dschang Bamileke". The Phonology of Tone: The Representation of Tonal Register, ed. by Harry van der Hulst and Keith Snider. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. 29-73
2. Mary Paster, UC Berkeley, "FLOATING TONES IN GÃ *" http://elanguage.net/journals/index.php/sal/article/view/1366/925
3. Wentum, Comfort. 1997. A Lexical Tonology of Ga. Legon: University of Ghana, M. Phil thesis.
4. Clements, G. N. and Kevin C. Ford. 1979. "Kikuyu tone shift and its synchronic consequences." Linguistic Inquiry 10: 179-210.
5. Kropp-Dakubu, Mary E. 1986. "Downglide, floating tones and non-WH questions in Ga and Dangme." The Phonological Representation of Suprasegmentais, ed. by Koen Bogers, Harry van der Hulst, and Maarten Mous. Dordrecht: Foris Publications. Pp. 153-173.
6. Zimmerman, 1. 1858. A grammatical sketch and vocabulary of the Akra- or Galanguage with an appendix on the Adanme dialect. Stuttgart, 2 vols. Republished with an Introduction by 1. Berry, Gregg International, 1972.
7. Goldsmith, John. 1976. Autosegmental Phonology. Cambridge: MIT, PhD. dissertation. Distributed by IULe.
8. Okunor, Vincent. 1969. Tone in the Ga verb. Legon: Institute of African Studies. Paster, Mary. 2000. "Issues in the tonology of Ga." Columbus: Ohio State University, Undergraduate thesis.
9. 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.

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