Garry W. Davis, Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Translation

Many languages use tone (differing levels of pitch) to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning. In languages such as Chinese or Thai, for example, each syllable of a word can carry its own tone. Many dialects of the Rhine valley originally made use of tone accent (also called pitch accent) in which there is a maximum of one tone per word, which is associated only with its stressed syllable. This talk will describe both sorts of tone systems and discuss theories of how they may have originated (a process sometimes referred to as tonogenesis).