This volume brings together two under-investigated areas of intonation typology. While tone languages make up to 70 percent of the world’s languages, only few have been explored for intonation. And even though one third of the world’s languages are spoken in Africa, and most sub-Saharan languages are tone languages, recent collections on tone and intonation typology have almost entirely ignored African languages. This book aims to fill this gap.

Tone: A Linguistic Survey is a nine-chapter text that considers the phonetics and phonology of tone from both a synchronic and a diachronic point of view. The first chapters deal with the physiological and perceptual correlations of tone. These chapters also describe the interactions of tonal and nontonal features. The succeeding chapters provide the phonetic basis for phonological tonal phenomena. These topics are followed by discussions of the physical and physiological aspects of tone, the number of possible contrastive tones in a language, and a suprasegmental representation of tones based on linguistic evidence. This text also summarizes the kinds of tone rules found in languages and the important syntactic function played by tone in a number of the world's languages, particularly those in Africa. The final chapters look into the general and specific principles that constrain historical tone change. This book will prove useful to students with phonology course.

Despite the recent advances in the integration of lexical tone and intonation in phonological theory, all too often the study of intonation and the study of lexical tone are viewed as belonging to different research traditions. This collection aims to strengthen the integrated approach by studying tone and intonation within a common framework, and by tracing their interaction in specific prosodic systems. Some papers deal with the structural properties of lexical tone and intonation, e.g. of Zina Kotoko (Cameroon), Borgloon Dutch (Belgium), and European Portuguese, while others focus on the historical development of the prosodic systems of Basque, Kagoshima Japanese and Scandinavian. The volume also includes a re-evaluation of a classic paper on the typology of tone rules, and a survey of features signalling question intonation in African languages.

First published in 1933, this book looks at the phonetics of African languages. It argues that a good grounding in phonetics and tone work is an indispensable preliminary to anyone embarking on a study of African language and so provides the material necessary for this in a simple form. The volume is primarily a practical manual for students of African languages but will also be an invaluable tool for students of general linguistics as a work of scientific interest. The languages observed present features of language that are very different to those found in Europe.

Une source inconnue indique : "This book provides a comprehensive overview of current research in African languages, drawing on insights from anthropological linguistics, typology, historical and comparative linguistics, and sociolinguistics. It covers a wide range of topics, from grammatical sketches of individual languages to sociocultural and extralinguistic issues."

This book is, to some extent, a reference work uniting theory and description. It comprises four structured parts: Phonetics, Phonology, Tonology, and Specific African Sound Patterns. By means of concrete examples, the book describes and compares a wide range of basic and current issues and facts that are of utmost relevance for all persons working on language or linguistics as well as in related fields. The book provides core instruments needed and used in the study of phonology and phonological analyses. It discusses modern phonological theories. Phonological issues and processes, such as vowel harmony, assimilation, dissimilation, lenition, as well as fortition are explained. Prosodic topics, such as tone, stress, pitch, and intonation are considered. Issues in tonology include tonological analysis, tonal behaviour and rules. Special attention is given to specific sounds found in African languages.