Universal 902: omnisyllabic tone ⇒ monosyllabic morphemes
- Original
- There appears to be a necessary connection between omnisyllabic tone and monosyllabic morphemes.
- Standardized
- IF tone is omnisyllabic, THEN morphemes are monosyllabic.
- Keywords
- tone, morpheme, syllable
- Domain
- phonology
- Type
- implication
- Status
- achronic
- Quality
- absolute?
- Basis
- languages in Matisoff 1994
- Source
- Matissoff 1994: 115
- Counterexamples
In a language with omnisyllabic tone system, virtually every syllable occurs with a distinctive tone that is not predictable either in terms of the syntactic structure of its phrase or phonotactically in terms of neighboring syllables.