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:
“Eftsoones the Nymphes, which now had Flowers their fill,
Ran all in haste, to see that silver brood,
As they came floating on the Christal Flood,”
—Edmund Spenser (1552?–1599)
“Whose are the truly labored sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month’s labor in the farmer’s almanac, to restore our tone and spirits.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)