Tonal Inflection in Mande Languages: the Cases of Bamana and Dan-Gwtaa Valentin Vydrin
Tonal inflection in Mande languages: The cases of Bamana and Dan-Gwtaa Valentin Vydrin To cite this version: Valentin Vydrin. Tonal inflection in Mande languages: The cases of Bamana and Dan-Gwtaa. Palancar, Enrique L., Léonard, Jean Léo. Tone and Inflection: New facts and new perspectives, De Gruyter, pp.83-105, 2016, 978-3-11-045275-4. halshs-01287458 HAL Id: halshs-01287458 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01287458 Submitted on 14 Mar 2016 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Tonal inflection in Mande languages: The cases of Bamana and Dan-Gwɛɛtaa Valentin Vydrin 1. Introduction Mande is a mid-range language family (its time depth ranges between 5000 and 6000 years) presumably belonging to the Niger-Congo macrofamily. It comprises more than 70 languages. Practically all Mande languages are tonal, therefore the Proto-Mande language most probably was tonal too. Tonal systems of the modern Mande languages are very diverse in the number of tones, in the complexity of rules conditioning the passage of tones from the underlying level to the surface, in the role grammatical tone and a number of tonal morphemes; for a survey (although outdated in some points) see (Vydrine 2004).
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