Semantic Change Indicated by Tone

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2.2.3 Change Caused for Grammatical Reasons

Pike indicates two different kinds of changes that are related to grammar rather than environment. The first of these involves a semantic change in tense or person. The second is a change produced by the phrasal position of the lexeme in question.

2.2.3.1 Semantic Change Indicated by Tone

Pike does not give many examples of the type of grammatical tone which indicates semantic differences solely through changes in tone. The two categories that she mentions that can be modified by a change in tone are person and tense. Both the subject and object can be indicated on a verb in Soyaltepec Mazatec, as the example in 19 demonstrates. By changing the tones on the verb and its enclitics, both the subject and object are altered. 19 Person indicated through tone Pike 1956:58 a. ts︢hwa˧-na˥ ‘He gives me’ b. ts︢hwa˧˩-na˧˦ ‘I give him’ The non-tonal segments in 19a-b are exactly the same. 19a has a level Mid tone on the root of the verb followed by a High tone on the enclitic. This is contrasted in 19b with a Mid to Low ˧˩ falling tone on the root of the verb followed by a Mid to Mid-high ˧˦ rising tone on the enclitic. Both words indicate a transaction between first and third person, but the choice of tone indicates the directionality of the transaction. The other example that Pike gives in which tone is used to indicate a grammatical distinction is evident in the difference between the present and the future tense 20. 63 20 Tense change indicated by tone Pike 1956:58 Present Future a. t ʃ︢i˧ni˧˩ t ʃ︢i˩ni˩ ‘you eat’ ‘you will eat’ b. t ʃ︢ʔa˦na˩tʃ︢ei˩ t ʃ︢ʔa˩na˩tʃ︢ei˩ ‘you deceive’ ‘you will deceive’ In 20a and b the present tense of each verb contains tones that are lexically determined, in other words, no specific tonal pattern appears on the verb to indicate present tense. The first example, 20a, has a Mid tone on the first syllable followed by a falling tone on the second while the second example, 20b, has a Mid- high tone on the first syllable followed by two syllables with Low tones. In the future tense of each verb, all of the tones are Low. In this case, the Low tones on the first syllable of the verbs indicate that the tense of the verb is future. These grammatical usages of tone are not pursued in depth by Pike. The limited number of examples clearly indicates that this is not the focus of her paper. She discusses tone changes produced by the phrasal position of the lexeme only slightly more than these semantically rich instances of grammatical tone.

2.2.3.2 Change Caused by Phrasal Position