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Lexical tone contrast in Izon as ubiquitous floating tone

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Nicholas Rolle
Nicholas Rolle*
Affiliation:
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), Schützenstr. 18, Berlin 10117 Germany
*
rolle@leibniz-zas.de
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Abstract

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This paper establishes the lexical tone contrasts in the Nigerian language Izon, focusing on evidence for floating tone. Many tonal languages show effects of floating tone, though typically in a restricted way, such as occurring with only a minority of morphemes, or restricted to certain grammatical enviromnents. For Izon, the claim here is that all lexical items sponsor floating tone, making it ubiquitous across the lexicon and as common as pre-associated tone. The motivation for floating tone comes from the tonal patterns of morphemes in isolation and within tone groups. Based on these patterns, all lexical morphemes are placed into one of four tone classes defined according to winch floating tones they end in. Class A morphemes end in a floating ( ‘wife’), class B in ( ‘salt’), class C in ( ‘sand’), and class D in ( ‘him’). This paper provides extensive empirical support for tins analysis and discusses several issues which emerge under ubiquitous floating tone. Issues include the principled allowance of OCP(T) violations, and the propensity for word-initial vowels and low tone to coincide.

Keywords

prosodylexical contrastfloating tonetone associationIjoid

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonological Data and Analysis , Volume 3 , Issue 4 , 2021, pp. 1 - 40
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
Published by the Linguistic Society of America with permission of the author under a CC BY 3.0 license.
Copyright
Copyright © Nicholas Rolle.

Footnotes

*

Primary thanks go to consultant and collaborator Jumbo Gift for ensuring the data and recordings were as good as possible (see Appendix D for further information). Funding for fieldwork was provided by an Oswalt Endangered Language Grant from the Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley (2017), and the Program in Linguistics/Humanities Council at Princeton University (2019). For support in Nigeria, I am indebted to Ozo-mekuri Ndimele and Ebitare Obikudo (Port Harcourt), and Demola Lewis, Bernard Caron, and Martin Mbella (Ibadan). For much constructive feedback, I thank Larry Hyman, the 2019 Manchester Phonology Meeting, and Megan J. Crowhurst and the anonymous reviewers for PDA. All errors in this paper are solely my own.

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