Tone and inflection: An introduction

Accepted in Enrique L. Palancar & Jean-Léo Léonard (eds.), Tone and Inflection: New facts under new perspectives. Submitted to DeGruyter, Oct. 2014Tone is about melody and meaning, inflection is about grammar and this book is about a bit of both. The different papers in this book study possible and sometimes very complex ways in which the melodies of a given language engage in the expression of grammatical meaning. In this light, the volume aims to broaden our understanding of the role of tone in the making of grammar. We believe this is important because it challenges a widespread conception of tone as being a lexical phenomenon only. This conception flows from the expectation that any typical tone language should be like Mandarin Chinese or Vietnamese, but these are languages with little or no inflectional morphology. The contributions in this volume challenge this view by showing that there is more to tone than meets the eye