A floating tone is a morpheme or element of a morpheme that contains no consonants, no vowels, but only tone. It cannot be pronounced by itself, but affects the tones of neighboring morphemes.
An example occurs in Bambara. Bambara has two phonemic tones, high and low. In this language, the definite article is a floating low tone. With a noun in isolation, it is associated with the preceding vowel, turning 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 where only their tone remains.
Famous quotes containing the words floating and/or tone:
“Life is crazy. Now, maybe you knew this all along. But before I had children, I actually held on to the illusion that there was some sense of order to the universe.... I am now convinced that we are all living in a Chagall painting—a world where brides and grooms and cows and chickens and angels and sneakers are all mixed up together, sometimes floating in the air, sometimes upside down and everywhere.”
—Susan Lapinski (20th century)
“When you listen to gongs and drums, listen to the music; when you listen to someone talk, listen to his tone of voice.”
—Chinese proverb.