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:
“It is only for a little while, only occasionally, methinks, that we want a garden. Surely a good man need not be at the labor to level a hill for the sake of a prospect, or raise fruits and flowers, and construct floating islands, for the sake of a paradise. He enjoys better prospects than lie behind any hill. Where an angel travels it will be paradise all the way, but where Satan travels it will be burning marl and cinders.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It makes me hate accepting things that are probable when they are held up before me as infallibly true. I prefer these words which tone down and modify the hastiness of our propositions: “Perhaps, In some sort, Some, They say, I think,” and the like.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)