Tone

Toaq is a tonal language. It has tones! That is: saying a word with a rising or falling vocal intonation, for example, makes for a difference in meaning.

Function of tones

Toaq has mostly grammatical tone: when you change the tone of a word, its grammatical function changes (for example dẻ “is beautiful” → dẽ “beautifully”).

This is in contrast to lexical tone, like in Chinese: there, when you change the tone of a syllable, it becomes a different word (lexeme) entirely. For example 西 xı̄ “west” → 媳 xí “daughter-in-law”.

Toaq has a little bit of lexical tone, too, limited to speech act particles: da and dâ are two different lexemes.

The four tones

The falling tone is used for verbs, predicatizers, and adjectives. (fa “goes”, kúe gı “the good book”, … po káto “… of the cat”)
The rising tone is used for nouns, determiners, and pronouns. (káto “the cat”, sá kato “some cat(s)”, jí “I/me”)
The low glottal tone is used for complementizers and clause-initiating words. (ꝡä gı “that it’s good”)
The rising-falling tone is for adverbial adjuncts. (fêı “angrily”, nîe tíaı “inside the box”)

Interaction with parts of speech

This table shows how the four tones interact with Toaq's parts of speech:

	Falling tone	Rising tone	Glottal tone	Rising-falling tone
Verb	Verbal complex Serial tail Adjective Determiner complement	Bound variable		Adjunct
Pronoun		Argument	Incorporated object
Determiner		Argument	Incorporated object
Complementizer	Speech act complement		Subclause head	Incorporated object
Interjection	Interjection	Inquiry		Expression of empathy
Speech act particle	Lexical tone (i.e. dâ and da are simply different lexemes)
Focus particle	Steals tone from head if possible, otherwise echoes it
Conjunction	Highest precedence	Default precedence		Second highest precedence

External links

Refgram: Tones