Complex phenomena of grammatical tone, well-described for many African languages, are increasingly attested also in the Tibeto-Burman family. This paper describes the tone assignment rule and two cases of tonal expression of grammatical categories in the Tibeto-Burman language Anal. The typologically unusual rule involves tone spreading, tonal polarity on a non-edge constituent and additional spreading, resulting in constant tonal patterns across grammatical suffixes. In two different cases the combination of the tonal pattern assigned by this rule with peculiar morpho-tonological processes results in a marking of a grammatical category (future and 1sg-person) by grammatical tone, by vowel-length, or only by the overall tonal pattern of the verbal form. Both cases are related to the omission of an explicit marking of the category, although the outcome cannot be explained only by the concept of a floating tone.
The paper describes the person-indexing morphology in Anal (Northwestern South-Central (formerly "Old Kuki"), Manipur, India) with an emphasis on the different forms in the rich verbal system of the language. As in many other related languages, the indexation in Anal verbs is performed by two sets of morphemes: suffixes and prefixes. The suffixes are the set of archaic morphemes attested across different branches of the language family. The prefix paradigm consists of the adnominal possessive forms typical for the South-Central branch, but exhibits peculiar person shifts. Most of the paradigms employ explicit suffixes for the A/S-marking and prefixes for the P-marking of Speech Act Participants (SAP). 3 rd person is not marked explicitly. Originally nominal forms that use Stem-2 have two different indexation patterns: 3:P scenarios mark the A-referent by prefixes, while SAP:P scenarios mark the P-referent by a prefix and the A-argument by a suffix. P-prefixes are derived from A-prefixes by vowel-lengthening. There are a few additional personindexing forms in less frequent paradigms and peculiar paradigm-specific changes such as 1 st personmarking by tone and length in one of the tenses. The overall system shows historical evidence for multiple cycles of periphrastic constructions with the copula as the conjugated form.
It tends to be assumed that tonal languages do not make use of intonational tones and accent location for the purpose of conveying information structural aspects of the utterance. This study of read-aloud stories in colloquial Burmese shows that this tonal language does resort to this sort of intonational means for information-structuring reasons. The prosody of Burmese exhibits identifiable intonational patterns, which function on the level of accentual phrases. An accentual phrase constitutes the basic prosodic unit, and it is there that we find the real interaction of information structure, intonation and tone. Accentual phrases are organised around a single accent, the location of which depends on information structural factors. Sentences can consist of a single accentual phrase or a few phrases, while the exact partition into such phrases is also motivated by information- and discourse-structuring considerations.
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